Her voice tried to fight death…
But death never listens.
"There was a silence between her final scream and my arrival —
a silence so loud it rewrote my heartbeat."
"Oh, Maria…" I whispered to the wind. "If only you'd let me stand beside you... maybe this wouldn't have happened."
I ran. No hesitation. No thought. No plan. Just instinct.
The scent of blood led me through the underbrush like a cursed compass. I didn't notice the thorns tearing at my suit or the branches clawing at my mask. The forest had stilled itself—so quiet, it was unnatural. Even the wind refused to whisper. It was as if the trees themselves bowed their heads in mourning.
Then I saw it.
It stood half in shadow, half in blasphemy.
A creature that had no right to exist—
A grotesque hybrid of ravenous instinct and bio-tampered sin. It resembled a sheep, if sheep were ever sculpted by a child fever-dreaming through trauma. Its wool shimmered like steel filament soaked in ink. Tumors pulsated beneath the surface, throbbing like a second heart. The thing's breath wheezed, wet and angry, as if it hated being alive.
Its eyes—milky, off-center, and softly glowing red—didn't offer light. They offered infection.
It locked eyes with me.
And something inside me shifted.
Not fear. Not courage.
Something... other.
A pressure, ancient and impossible, filled my chest—and in that moment, the beast turned and fled.
Like it saw something behind my face. Like I was the worse monster.
"Perhaps monsters don't fear death," I murmured aloud. "They fear mirrors."
I stepped forward.
Then I saw her.
Maria.
What was left of her.
And I stopped moving—not out of logic or calculation—but because everything in me collapsed like a faulty tower. My bones refused to hold me. My lungs rejected the air. Her mouth—frozen in her final scream—seemed to reach me late, as if the sound had only now caught up with the horror.
I dropped to my knees.
She hadn't just been killed. She had been… undone.
Shredded from the hip down. Part of her face still intact, yet softened unnaturally—like it had started to melt. The dirt around her wasn't just soaked in blood. Something darker had bled there—thicker, pulsing faintly, like the earth itself had inhaled her pain.
I clutched my mask.
The world spun, but I couldn't afford to fall.
"There's a kind of grief that doesn't scream," I thought. "It just waits… and watches you collapse."
I stayed.
Time lost its rhythm. My heart beat like a glitch.
Eventually, numbness came.
Not strength.
Not resilience.
Just... an emptiness thick enough to stand in.
Even here—in what we called the Safe Zone—death had no curfew.
Maria had fought. That much was clear.
Her plasma revolver still hissed in her palm. The burn trail of her last shot cut through the brush like a dying comet. One shot had landed—singed through a rib-like protrusion still lying nearby. But it wasn't enough. Not against that thing.
I scanned the area.
Not with my eyes—those lied too easily.
I used what I'd learned to trust: the tilt of broken stalks, the angle of blood splatter, the footprints that pretended to be random. And what I saw…
was too clean.
Too prepared.
Someone had curated this scene. Or something.
"In war," I whispered, "clean is more terrifying than chaos. It means someone knew."
I pulled up the terrain logs, location pings, camera nodes.
Nothing helpful.
But inside me… a chill.
Like I remembered something that hadn't happened yet.
Like a shadow had brushed past a memory I didn't own.
No time.
Reinforcements would arrive soon. If they found me first, standing over her corpse, grief wouldn't matter.
They'd call me a variable.
And variables get eliminated.
"My face was carved in grief. My hands trembled.
But inside… I was counting down."
When the backup squad arrived, I didn't speak.
I didn't need to. They were trained not to ask questions when the answers were written in blood.
Maria's body was bagged, tagged, sanitized. The way you treat contaminated data. As if even her death had to be sterilized.
Nahida muttered under her breath, "She's lucky we even found a body. Most don't get that mercy."
Dr. Khanna tapped the base of his glove. "Hope's too expensive to carry out here."
Miss Katrina looked at me, then away. "Do you think… her scream reached anyone?"
No one answered.
Then Katrina, eyes hollow as frost, knelt beside the scorch trail and whispered—not to us, but to something older:
"The forest doesn't bury its dead. It just watches them rot into memory."
But we all heard it—
echoing in our minds:
"There are no happy endings here.
Only quieter exits."
I left before the questions began.
The beetle I had been tracking—vanished. Scorched ground where it had been. Picked clean.
Nature doesn't pause to mourn.
So I walked.
Past the trees that stood too still.
Past the insects that refused to buzz.
Past the birds that dared not sing.
Everything avoided me.
As if I'd already died.
Or worse—
As if something far darker walked behind me.
"Some forests are not haunted.
They are the ones doing the haunting."
Eventually, I reached higher ground.
Jagged stone ripped up from the earth like bone. A silver river wound through the valley—too still, too silent. Its surface shimmered like stretched skin. Light didn't reflect. It got swallowed.
I stood at its edge.
Then I stepped back.
Because I almost walked in.
Not from despair.
But from… quiet.
I sat.
Not to mourn.
Just to pause.
To exist.
To survive the space between breaths.
Even now, I felt sadness—not just for Maria, but for the island, for myself, for all the brilliance swallowed whole.
Maria was sharp. Merciless. Obsessive. And alive.
Now?
Nothing but a name on a screen.
The sky wept violet overhead.
Then… I saw the wolf.
Black. Massive. Limbs like branches that grew from shadow. It stepped out of the fog. Looked at me. Growled once.
Then knelt.
And I understood:
I wasn't alone.
Something was watching.
Not from the trees.
From inside them.
"I couldn't see Him.
But the wolf could."
And then… a voice.
No echo. No source.
Just there.
Like time. Like silence. Like shame.
"Walk long enough in silence," it said,
"and it starts to speak back."
Then the wolf vanished.
And the dusk fell.
And I whispered:
"The sun sets like a forgotten promise,
And the moon rises, carrying all the regrets left unspoken.
Morning is a breath. Night is a wound.
Success and failure… both are shadows.
When you look back,
All that remains is the silence."