Sleep did not come.
He lay on the cold stone floor, back pressed against the wall, knees drawn up, staring into the dark. His body begged for rest, but his mind refused to loosen its grip. Every time his eyes fluttered shut, something inside him screamed wake up.
The pain helped.
It kept him anchored. Sharp, constant, impossible to ignore. His stump throbbed beneath the crude tourniquet, heat seeping into his chest, into his thoughts. He counted his breaths. Lost track. Started again.
Drip.
He froze.
Not water.
Something thick slid across the stone outside the shelter. Slow. Deliberate. He held his breath, listening so hard his ears rang. After a while, the sound faded—but the silence it left behind felt heavier than before.
Listen. Do not see.
He kept his eyes closed.
That was when the whispers started.
Not voices. Never words. Just the impression of sound pressing against his skull, like someone speaking from the other side of a wall he couldn't quite hear through. Sometimes it sounded like breathing. Sometimes like fingers dragging across bark.
Sometimes like nothing at all.
He dozed.
Or thought he did.
His body jerked violently, eyes snapping open, heart racing. For a split second, he was certain someone was standing over him. The dark seemed thicker there, gathered into a shape that vanished the moment he focused.
He laughed once. A short, broken sound.
"Yeah," he murmured. "That tracks."
Time stretched.
The moon never appeared.
Hours passed—he assumed. The cold deepened. His thirst returned, slower this time, more patient. His thoughts began to unravel at the edges. Faces flickered behind his eyelids. His parents. Friends. People he wasn't sure he had ever met.
He wondered which ones would survive the night with him.
Something circled the shelter.
He didn't hear footsteps. He felt them. A pressure shifting around the stone, testing it, brushing close enough to make his skin prickle. Once, something exhaled near the entrance—hot, wet, impossibly deep.
He bit into his sleeve to keep from screaming.
It lingered.
Then, eventually, it moved on.
When exhaustion finally dragged him under, it was not gentle. Sleep took him like a blow to the head, sudden, disorienting, merciless.
He dreamed of the forest breathing.
He woke up still alive.
Dawn did not come.
But the night, at least, had ended.
------
The days that followed blurred together.
If they could even be called days.
Nothing changed in the sky. The ashen light remained constant, dull and directionless. Time had to be measured differently, by hunger, by pain, by how often he had to retighten the tourniquet.
He survived.
Barely.
He learned where to step and where not to. Which trunks groaned under his weight and which held firm. He learned to move slowly, to pause often, to listen more than he breathed. The forest punished haste. It rewarded caution with nothing more than continued existence.
Food was… theoretical.
Once, he found something pale and fibrous growing in the shadow of a fallen trunk. He watched it for a long time before touching it. Then longer before tasting it. It made him sick. He ate it anyway the next day.
Water became his only real routine.
The trip to the stream never got easier. It only became familiar. The singing stones still hummed when he passed too close, and each time his heart tried to claw its way out of his chest. Each time, he listened. Each time, he did not look.
The shelter remained unchanged.
The skeletons did not move. The carvings did not fade. If anything, they seemed more desperate now that he understood them. He traced the marks with his fingers sometimes, reading the warnings again and again, as if repetition might summon meaning.
At night, he stopped dreaming.
That scared him more than the nightmares.
His thoughts grew smaller. Less about escape. Less about why. Survival reduced everything to simple calculations: pain versus movement, hunger versus risk, rest versus safety.
He began to forget things.
Faces. Voices. The sound of the city. The exact color of the moon.
Hope didn't vanish all at once.
It thinned.
Like water stretched too far.
Like a voice that keeps talking long after no one is listening.
And somewhere, deep between the dead giants, the forest endured, unchanged, unbothered, waiting to see how long he would last.
--------
The smell came first.
He noticed it one morning while retightening the tourniquet. A faint, sweet rot that didn't belong in the forest of ash. His stomach clenched before his mind caught up.
He didn't need to look.
He did anyway.
The flesh around the stump was swollen, dark, angry. Veins spidered outward in sickly shades, and the skin felt too warm under his fingers. When he pulled his hand back, it trembled.
"No," he whispered.
Infection.
Of course it was. Of course this place wouldn't allow something as mundane as healing. He leaned back against the stone, breathing hard, mind racing in tight, panicked circles.
If it spread, he was done.
No medicine. No antibiotics. No miracle waiting in the forest.
There was only one option.
He laughed.
A dry, hysterical sound that echoed too loudly in the shelter.
"I'm really doing this," he muttered. "I really am."
Cauterization.
The word felt unreal, like something from a textbook or a bad movie. Not something meant for him. Not for a guy who used to complain about paper cuts and headaches.
He needed fire.
The idea alone was terrifying.
Fire meant light. Light meant visibility. Visibility meant attention. But infection meant death, and death was starting to feel impatient.
He scavenged what he could, dry splinters snapped from ancient bark, fibrous scraps shaved from deadwood that crumbled at his touch. Everything was brittle here, preserved by ash and time.
It took hours.
His hands shook constantly. Several times, he had to stop and sit down before he passed out. When he finally managed to coax a spark—two stones struck together, again and again—he stared at it like it was alive.
When the flame caught, small and weak, panic surged through him.
The shelter filled with flickering light.
Shadows twisted instantly. The pillars outside seemed to lean closer, their silhouettes stretching unnaturally across the walls. The forest noticed.
"Just… just a minute," he whispered. "That's all."
He fed the fire carefully, heart pounding so hard it hurt. The heat grew. Smoke stung his eyes. His breath came in short, shallow gasps.
Then he took a piece of metal he had salvaged earlier—something sharp, something solid—and held it over the flames.
It glowed.
Red. Then orange.
Too bright.
Too real.
His mind rebelled violently then, screaming at him to stop, to throw it away, to run, to do anything else. His vision blurred. His stomach churned.
"You don't have a choice," he told himself, voice breaking. "You don't."
He pressed the heated metal to the infected flesh.
The scream ripped out of him before he could stop it.
Pain exploded, white and absolute, drowning thought entirely. The smell of burning flesh filled the shelter, thick and nauseating. He thrashed, nearly dropping the metal, tears pouring freely as his body convulsed.
Something inside him broke.
Not physically.
Something else.
When it was over, he collapsed, sobbing silently, teeth clenched so hard his jaw ached. The fire crackled softly beside him, indifferent. The forest did not respond—yet.
He lay there for a long time, shaking, barely aware of his own breathing.
Alive.
Still alive.
The pain didn't fade. But it stabilized, settling into something sharp and contained instead of spreading. He stared at the ceiling of stone and dead wood, exhausted beyond words.
"I hate you," he whispered to the world. "I really do."
The fire burned low.
Eventually, he put it out.
Darkness rushed back in, heavier than before.
But the infection had been stopped.
And once again, against all reason—
He had chosen to live.