The laughter hung in the forest like smoke.
It had been a while since I first heard it
that bright, too-short burst of courage listening to itself.
Dusk had stretched itself between the trunks, a thin band of gray that couldn't decide whether it wanted to be day or night.
The wind had fallen asleep.
Only the ground was awake.
I still sat on the hut's threshold, the mask in my hand, the knife at my belt, the totem beside me like an animal purring concentration.
Under the floorboards, that familiar quiet scraping,
as if someone underneath wanted to scratch their own lid open.
"Soon," I had said.
The forest had nodded.
Now they were close.
Five.
I heard it before I saw them: five different breathing rhythms, five ways of dealing with fear.
The first walked in front, strides longer than necessary, as if posture could impress the ground.
The lamp in his hand, cold white LED turning bark into skin, cut through the fog and swallowed more than it showed.
Behind him, a second voice, slightly higher, always cracking upward,
finding commentary in every fat trunk.
The third laughed too often to mean it.
The fourth said little but carried a backpack that clattered with metal.
The fifth kept to the edge, steps indecisive, as if he had already once heard the forest whisper.
They came from the west, up the slope where the blackberry vines lie across the ground like barbed wire.
You could hear they weren't used to holding on to things that scratch back.
I rose quietly, put on the mask, and stepped into the shadow of the firs.
The forest pushed fog in front of me like a curtain.
I didn't need to make an effort.
It wanted to play.
"Bro, I told you! Look! This is totally the forest from the stories!" shouted the one with the lamp.
His voice was too big for his face.
"Dude, it's just a forest."
That was the one with the backpack. Steady. Annoyed.
"We film this and go back."
"Rite of courage, Kenan," the third chimed in, a thin laugh trailing behind.
"Otherwise you'll say again the trapper scared you off."
"Is this even the right entrance?" asked another voice...female, slightly lower, with that trained hardness you use when you don't want to be the last among boys.
So: five.
Tom in front.
Leon with the commentary.
Kenan with the backpack.
The girl, later they called her Mila.
And the fifth, who had said almost nothing.
I called him, quietly, the one with the wound; his gait betrayed a leg that hadn't been right long before the forest.
They followed no path, but they followed their own noise.
That's enough for the forest.
Rule Eleven: Whoever laughs before they hear, hears later.
I let them pass the hut.
They wouldn't see it.
The hut isn't a house.
It's a memory someone forgot to put away.
In dusk it disappears completely.
They headed straight for the clearing.
The fallen trunk.
My new trap.
Of course they did.
Humans always walk toward things that look like borders.
Gates, crosses, towers, dead trees.
They think something begins behind them.
In the forest, "behind" is always the same.
"There!" cried Leon, and the lamp swept over the trunk.
"See? That tree looks exactly like in the photo Jonas sent."
"Jonas is a wimp," said Tom, though he stopped.
"It's just a tree. Shine on it."
The light wandered across bark, caught the resin I'd rubbed there,
glinted on the cloth scrap hanging in the wire.
That olive-green piece of uniform I'd taken from the thorn swayed slightly, though no wind moved.
Kenan froze.
"Bro, what is that?"
"Leftover military stuff, Graypoint or something," said Tom.
"This is sick. This is content."
"Content," Mila repeated softly, like she tasted the word once before spitting it out.
The fifth, likely Jonas, lagged behind, hands clenched in his jacket pockets.
He wasn't looking at the trunk.
He was looking into the forest.
Where I stood.
His gaze hovered just beneath my mask.
Maybe he saw only shadow.
Maybe more.
Some eyes know the difference.
The trap waited.
The wire lay so low it looked more like whim than intention, stretched between two roots about as old as the oldest one of them would ever become, if he were lucky.
I stepped back once.
I wanted to see, hear, feel how they reacted.
This trap wasn't built to kill.
Not directly.
It was a conversation.
"Careful, that stuff's probably rusty," muttered Kenan, bending down.
His fingers reached for the cloth.
The bones I'd hung on the wire were ready for their work.
The first contact was quiet.
A minimal touch, a wrong millimeter, and the wire vibrated.
The small light bones knocked together, scraped along one another and made a sound somewhere between a whisper and chalk on glass
too high, too short, too unnatural to understand immediately.
Mila flinched.
"Did you hear that?"
"What?" asked Leon, though his shoulders were already lifted.
"That… " She shivered. "Like when… I don't know. Like when bones…"
She didn't finish.
The radio plate on the trunk took the impulse.
The wire fed the vibration into the old metal tied to the totem's memory.
For a moment the tree itself trembled, barely visible, only the bark shivering.
The device answered with a static like breath.
A half word, torn from another time, squeezed out:
"…Point…"
Nothing more.
Enough.
Tom laughed.
Too short. A pitch too high.
"Dude, that's just an old speaker or something. Some army drill crap. Relax."
"Army drills, yeah sure," muttered Kenan.
His hand pressed his knee.
"That thing moved. I felt it."
"Roots grow," said Tom. "You sleep through school or what?"
It wasn't growth.
The root beneath the trunk had actually lifted when the wire reacted.
A few centimeters.
Just enough to show something had noticed someone was here who didn't belong.
The forest likes its traps to have body language.
Jonas stepped half a pace back, onto a spot I knew was hollow.
Only leaves over a thin crust of soil.
Underneath a pocket where water often gathers.
His foot broke through, not deep, but suddenly.
He flung his arms up, lost balance, and slammed his knee against the trunk's edge.
His scream was honest.
Not dying.
Just hurt.
But that's the prelude.
"Shit! Jonas!" Mila rushed to him first.
Blood soaked through the jeans, a dark spot smelling of familiar pain.
I tasted iron in my mouth though none of it touched me.
The totem vibrated at my hip, as if checking I was listening.
"It's just a knee," Jonas gasped.
"I… I just got startled. Just a hole. I'm fine."
He wasn't fine.
The forest had marked him.
It rarely takes several at once.
It chooses one first.
Rule Twelve:
The first who falls doesn't necessarily belong to the forest first.
But he belongs to it.
They whispered fiercely, phones lifted, signal checked.
No bars.
Of course not.
Graypoint burned holes in the sky, and the forest doesn't fill them with reception.
"How far in are we?" asked Mila.
"Maybe we really should"
"We're not even at the altar," Tom cut her off.
"We're not going back just because Jonas kissed the dirt."
"That's not funny."
Kenan now stood with the trunk between him and the forest.
"This is seriously weird. The sounds, that thing, the root…"
"That's why we film it," said Leon.
"Guys, we'll go viral, don't you get it?"
Viral.
A virus doesn't stand a chance in the forest.
Wood knows only fungi and blood.
I decided to let them move on.
The trap had done its job:
It showed them something here responds.
That the forest isn't just trees
it's answer.
The real hunt starts when fear has already left its print.
I slipped sideways deeper into the trees, circling around them.
Not in front.
Around.
I wanted to see what shape they took when they believed no one watched.
They walked slower now.
Jonas limping, supported by Mila.
Tom still in front, but his steps had that careful testing you see when someone first understands the ground is not a promise, only an option.
They talked less.
The lamp flicked forward only, not to the sides.
Not a good instinct.
The forest never comes from the front.
"Tell me again why we're doing this," Mila muttered.
"Because otherwise in three years you'll still be saying you never dared anything," said Tom.
"It's just forest. Stories. The trapper, the altar, Graypoint, blah blah. Ridiculous."
"He's here anyway," Jonas whispered.
Tom half turned.
"Who?"
"That guy," Jonas said.
"I… I saw something earlier. By the creek. A face. Or… something. Mask maybe. A…"
The lamp skimmed across a trunk.
For a moment its light reflected in my mask, far back between the trees.
Only a reflection.
Only a breath.
Leon saw it.
I heard his breath stutter.
"Did you see that?" he hissed.
"What?" Tom asked too fast.
"Back there. Eyes. Or… something weird."
"Your imagination. Congrats."
I didn't move.
The forest did it for me.
A branch creaked somewhere far from where I stood.
Their attention snapped toward the noise.
Humans are simple devices.
Rule Thirteen:
Never show them what you are.
Show them only that there's more than them.
It didn't take long until they reached the second clearing, the one with the old stumps jutting up like broken teeth.
Between them lay a dip where fog pooled like stale breath.
Here the forest was thinner.
The sky showed a hint of color, gray-blue, damaged.
Far away, on good days, you could see the tips of the lighttowers.
Not today.
Today the forest owned everything.
"He should be here," Kenan whispered, mostly to himself.
"Jonas said they saw him here. That… altar or whatever."
"Altar," Mila repeated.
The word hung under her tongue like something you don't want to swallow.
They stopped at the edge.
The fog in the dip shifted almost invisibly, as if something beneath it breathed.
There was nothing.
Not yet.
The root altar lay farther.
This was only an antechamber.
"We're not going in there," Jonas said suddenly.
"I have a bad fucking feeling."
Tom laughed, but only half-protest.
"Then stay here with your fucked-up knee."
Mila shot him a look that said more than she spoke.
Leon rocked nervously from foot to foot.
Kenan grabbed his backpack strap like he needed something to remind him of weight.
I felt something stir beneath my feet.
Not the voice under the hut.
Something else.
Something I knew and yet didn't.
A cold tingling crept up my shins,
settled behind the kneecaps,
climbed into my back.
The totem vibrated harder.
The air changed taste.
Then I saw him.
He stood past the dip, just outside the fog,
a few meters before the first trunk marking the path to the altar.
A boy.
Thin.
Backpack bigger than his body.
Shoulders narrow.
Head tilted.
Eyes too large for the face.
No blood.
No roots.
No wounds.
He wasn't truly there,
and yet drawn clearer than any shadow.
The forest hadn't invented him.
It had kept him.
The boy I had carried to the altar first.
The one with the broken leg, the dirt-hands, the photo of the girl in his backpack.
The forest had taken his skin, his voice, his weight.
What remained was what cannot burn:
gaze, memory, residue.
I didn't lift my hand.
Last time I'd waved.
He'd turned to dust.
Now he simply stood.
As if nothing had ended.
As if today were just another version of the same day.
The teenagers saw him too.
"There's someone there," Mila whispered.
Not a question.
"A kid," Leon choked.
"What's a kid… doing in here?"
Tom took a step forward,
as if there were a rule saying small things must be protected.
He set his foot in the dip.
The fog didn't move aside.
It wrapped around his ankle.
"Hey!" Tom called.
"Hey, you! You okay?"
The boy didn't move.
He didn't look at Tom.
Not at me.
Not at the others.
He looked at a point between us.
At something neither of us could see.
Maybe at the line I crossed once when I carried him to the altar.
Then he opened his mouth.
The sound that came out was not a word and yet one.
It sounded like someone speaking through wet wood.
Short, brittle, but clear enough for the forest to repeat.
"Back," he said.
The fog vibrated.
The stumps groaned.
A bird somewhere unseen beat its wings but didn't lift.
Jonas stumbled back, nearly fell, slammed his good leg into a stump.
"I want out. I want out. Now."
"It's just some freak," said Tom, but his voice had lost its force.
"Some weirdo living out here. We'll just turn around and..."
He stopped because the ground gave way under Mila.
She had taken a step aside, away from the fog, away from the boy, closer to the edge,
a place I knew well.
A place the forest had long prepared:
roots tight beneath the surface, soil loose like an open mouth waiting for a foot.
She sank in.
Not deep.
Just to the knee.
Earth splashed, fog recoiled like a blanket torn away.
Something darker moved beneath the surface.
Mila screamed.
A sharp, short note that didn't know whether it was fear or surprise.
"Don't move!" Kenan shouted, lunged forward, grabbed her arm.
Too late.
The root that lay where once there had been only water tightened like a muscle finally given a command.
Something cold clasped her ankle, seeped through the fabric, pulled at her skin, searched for bone.
She screamed differently now.
Deeper.
The forest likes those tone changes.
Tom grabbed her upper arm, Leon the other.
Jonas limped forward as fast as he could.
Three humans against something that doesn't understand direction.
I stood on the edge, just outside the fog.
I could have intervened.
I didn't.
Order isn't a question of help.
Mila yanked her leg, her hands clawing into Tom's jacket.
"Pull! Pull me out! Please!"
Kenan pulled.
Tom pulled.
Leon pulled.
For a moment it seemed to work.
The root eased a fraction, soil crumbled, a piece of jeans came free
dirty, torn.
Then the forest meant business.
A mesh of thinner rootlets burst upward, stretched long beneath the soil like fingers under a blanket.
They slid between what still held her and closed around Mila's calf.
She was yanked downward so suddenly Tom almost fell in after her.
Only Leon, who had let go, kept him back.
Earth sprayed, fog ripped open.
Mila's hands scraped across the ground, leaving grooves.
Her eyes met mine.
For one direct moment.
She saw the mask.
She saw someone standing there
not a ghost, not a tower, not an accident.
Her mouth shaped a word, but the forest was faster.
The roots pulled.
The ground sealed.
Her scream cut off as if someone had slammed a door.
Silence.
Mila was gone.
Tom fell backward, hit the ground hard, air bursting from his lungs.
Leon knelt in the dirt, hands blood-smeared, unsure whose blood it was,
hers or his or his own.
Jonas whimpered, a low, ragged sound.
Kenan stared at the place where a leg had been moments ago.
The boy at the edge of the dip was gone.
The fog had returned.
Only the forest breathed.
I still stood there, the totem heavy in my hand,
the taste of earth, and something else, on my tongue.
Rule Fourteen, I thought, as their voices rose again, panicked, raw:
Who enters the forest as a dare gets tested.
And the test had only just begun.