The silence after Tenzing vanished wasn't empty; it was full of listening. The four of them stood rooted, not moving, not speaking, just breathing in shallow, careful pulls, waiting for the world to right itself. It didn't. The forest had taken something and offered nothing in return but its waiting quiet. The guide was gone, and with him, the last pretense of being on a normal hike. They were no longer travelers passing through. They were something else specimens under glass, mice in a maze where the walls could think.
They started walking again because standing still felt more dangerous. Each step was a negotiation with the ground. Rahul found himself placing his feet with exaggerated care, heel-to-toe, as if a heavy tread might offend the soil. The path underfoot was solid only if he didn't question it. If he stared too hard at where it was supposed to go, it would waver at the edges, the dirt seeming to shift and breathe. It was clearest when he looked just beside it, trusting his peripheral vision more than his direct gaze.
Satyam, driven by a mind that needed data, pulled out his phone. The screen lit his pale face in the gloom. No bars. He opened his mapping app. It showed a blank, grey field. He swiped to his compass. The digital needle spun in a frantic, dizzy circle before glitching, freezing at a ninety-degree angle from true north, pointing directly into the heart of a massive, gnarled oak.
"It's broken," he whispered, but they all knew it wasn't the phone.
That's when the forest offered its first real choice.
The trail didn't fork. It multiplied. One moment, there was a single, muddy track between two mossy stones. The next, they were standing at a perfect, silent crossroads. Four distinct paths radiated outwards, cutting through geography that made no sense. One dove straight down a near-vertical slope, yet the path looked smooth, traversable. Another climbed a sheer rock face via steps that shouldn't have been there. The third wound lazily through a sun-dappled patch of forest that, Rahul was certain, had been dark shadow seconds before. The fourth was narrow, shadowed, and almost polite in its unassuming darkness. It didn't look inviting or threatening. It just looked… aware.
They huddled together in the canter of this impossible star.
"This is insane," Deep breathed, his voice hushed. "We just came from there. There was no room for this."
Raghav didn't speak. He was staring at the fourth path, his body rigid. He slowly pushed up the sleeve of his jacket. The symbol on his wrist was no longer just dark. In the flat light of the clearing, it seemed to have depth, like a tiny, intricate scar. It didn't hurt, he'd said earlier. It ached. A dull, bone-deep throb.
Each path exuded a feeling, a psychic weather. Rahul sensed them as clearly as he felt the cold air on his skin.
The downward path smelled of woodsmoke and ripe apples. It felt like going home. A deep, primal part of him yearned for it, promising warmth and an end to fear.
The upward path was cold and thin, the air tasting of ozone and old stone. It felt like duty. It pulled at a stubborn, buried part of him that always took the harder road, the one that proved something.
The sunlit path was quiet, logical, serene. It felt like escape. Not a joyful one, but a clean, emotionless exit from the mess they were in.
And the fourth, the shadow path… it felt like recognition. It didn't promise or threaten. It simply acknowledged him, Raghav, all of them, with the quiet certainty of a mirror. It was the path that knew why they were here.
"That one," Deep said, pointing desperately to the downward, welcoming trail. "It's the only one that makes sense. We need to get lower, get out of this."
"Gravity is a fact," Satyam agreed, his voice tight with forced reason. "Following a decline is the rational choice. It will lead to water, to a river, to a way out."
Raghav remained silent, his gaze locked on the shadow path. He took a half-step towards it, then stopped, a tremor running through him.
Rahul listened to his friends argue safety and logic, but their words sounded thin, childish, like arguing over which door to take in a house that was on fire. The house itself was the problem. He felt the truth in his gut, a cold, heavy stone.
"We're not picking a direction," he said, his voice cutting through their debate. It sounded older than he felt. "We're picking a question. And that one—" he nodded toward the shadow path, "—is the only one that's asking the real one."
The decision wasn't a vote. It was a surrender. They moved toward the fourth path as a group, a silent, reluctant consensus. The moment they stepped onto its threshold, the air changed. It wasn't colder, but denser, like walking into a room where a difficult conversation had just ended. The light from the other paths dimmed, and when Rahul looked back, the crossroads was gone. Not overgrown, but erased. Where four options had been, there was now only the uninterrupted, ancient wall of the forest. There was no record of their choice, no way to reconsider.
The new path was a tunnel through a world that watched. The trees here were different—older, stranger, their bark twisted into shapes that suggested faces, hands, frozen gestures of warning or grief. The whispers began again, but they were no longer fragmented. They were clear, intimate, and devastatingly personal.
As Rahul walked, he heard his own father's voice, not from memory, but as if the man were walking beside him, speaking directly into his ear: "Is this what you left home for? To get lost in the woods like a child?"
Deep flinched, ducking his head as if slapped. "Stop it," he muttered, not to anyone present.
Satyam began reciting prime numbers under his breath, a frantic, rhythmic chant. "Two, three, five, seven, eleven…"
Raghav just walked, his face a mask of strained concentration, but tears were cutting clean tracks through the grime on his cheeks. He was hearing something too.
Time lost its shape. They would walk for what felt like an hour, and Rahul's watch would show five minutes had passed. Then they'd pause for a breath, and when he looked again, half an hour was gone. The sky remained a constant, bruised twilight, offering no comfort of dawn or finality of night.
The path began to turn on them. It reacted not to their feet, but to their emotions. When Rahul's fear spiked, the trail would narrow, thorny branches creeping in from the sides. When Deep's anger flared at their helplessness, the ground would become slippery, treacherous. When Satyam's logic failed and panic bubbled up, the path would fork into confusing, pointless spirals that led nowhere. It was a feedback loop of fear, the forest mirroring and amplifying their dread.
They came to another split. This one wasn't geometric. It was emotional. One route reeked of sweet, cloying decay—the smell of avoidance, of hiding and hoping the problem goes away. Another vibrated with a sharp, metallic anger. A third was numb, hollow, promising a blank nothingness. There was no safe option. Only flavours of defeat.
Raghav stumbled here, falling to his knees. He clutched his wrist, a low groan escaping him. As Rahul rushed to help him, he saw it: in the dark, wet soil, the faint imprint of the four-path symbol, as if it had been stamped into the earth by a passing foot. It was an echo of the mark on Raghav's skin. The forest wasn't just around them. It was inside them, writing its map on their very bodies.
When true darkness fell, it was sudden. One moment they could see the path; the next, they were blind. The whispers swelled into a chorus of regrets—their own, and those of countless others who had walked here. The pressure was immense, a weight on the soul. Rahul understood then, with a clarity that felt like shattering glass, what this place was.
It wasn't a haunted forest. It was a repository.
It didn't create fear. It harvested it. It collected every avoided decision, every unmade choice, every truth left unspoken by everyone who had ever entered its borders. The paths were the physical form of those lingering, unresolved things. And by walking them, they were feeding the forest with their own unfinished business.
He stopped walking. The others bumped into him, a knot of exhausted, terrified boys.
"We're doing it wrong," Rahul said into the oppressive dark. His voice was raw but steady. "We're trying to find a way out. That's what it wants. It wants us to keep choosing, keep feeding it with our fear of being wrong."
He turned, though he could see nothing. He felt Raghav's presence beside him, a trembling point of warmth.
"These paths shouldn't exist," Rahul said, louder now, speaking to the trees, the darkness, the listening silence. "They're not real. They're just… ghosts of choices people were too scared to make. We don't need to pick one."
He took a deliberate step, not forward along the path, but sideways, off the trail. His boot sank into cold, wet moss and soft earth.
Nothing happened. No abyss opened. No monster attacked.
The whispering stuttered, then faded to a confused murmur
Ahead, in the blackness, the multitude of forking, tempting, terrifying paths seemed to blur, their distinct pressures dissolving. They didn't vanish, but they lost their power. They were just shadows again.
The forest had been waiting for them to stop playing its game. To stop choosing from its poisoned menu. To finally, truly, face the fact that the only way out was through the thing they had been avoiding all along: the reason they were here, and the ancient, hungry silence at the heart of the Echoing Valley.
Fewer paths waited ahead now. Because the only one that mattered was the one they would have to make for themselves.