Time stopped meaning much after that.
Days passed—maybe. Weeks, perhaps. He measured time in pain cycles now. In how often the fever came back. In how long it took for hunger to become quiet again.
He survived.
That fact alone felt unreal.
He learned which sounds meant nothing and which ones demanded stillness. He learned how long he could stay awake before exhaustion forced his eyes shut. He learned to move slowly, carefully, never trusting the ground beneath his feet.
He never ran again.
The stump of his arm never healed properly. The infection receded after the cauterization, leaving behind a hard, ugly scar that burned whenever he moved too much. Sometimes it throbbed for hours, a deep reminder that his body was already failing him.
Food was scarce.
Roots that tasted like ash. Insects he crushed between stones, forcing himself not to think about what crawled inside them. Once, something small and pale that stopped moving when he approached it too closely—he didn't eat that. He didn't ask himself why.
Hope thinned quietly.
Not in a dramatic way. It didn't break. It eroded.
Each morning he woke up expecting nothing. Each night he lay down assuming he would wake again, because assuming otherwise hurt too much.
He explored farther now.
Not boldly. Not with curiosity.
With resignation.
The Burned Forest revealed itself in fragments. Endless black pillars stretching into the ashen sky, their broken trunks forming a chaotic sea of dead giants. The deadfall remained impassable, layered so thick it swallowed sound and light alike. The gaps between the ancient trees stayed dark, swallowing anything that fell into them.
He never looked down into those gaps anymore.
Some things were better left unknown.
Sometimes he talked to himself.
Not loudly. Just enough to remember the sound of a human voice.
"I had a life," he whispered once, sitting against a warm stone that still held heat from a weak sun. "I complained about stupid things."
He laughed, softly.
"Work. Noise. Being tired."
Silence answered him.
The thought that hurt the most was not dying here.
It was the idea that even if he escaped, the person who would leave this place would not be the one who entered it.
By the time he noticed the fever returning, it was already too late to pretend it wasn't happening.
The scar had darkened. The skin around it felt hot, angry.
He knew what that meant.
If he wanted to live, he would have to burn himself again.
And fire, in this forest, never came without consequences.
------
They came sometimes.
Not every day. Not on any rhythm he could understand. Just often enough that he never truly relaxed.
Most of them were… wrong.
Limbs where there shouldn't be limbs. Shapes that suggested symmetry and then betrayed it. Movements that felt hesitant, as if the creature itself wasn't fully convinced of its own existence. Some crawled. Some dragged themselves across the deadfall. Others moved too smoothly, gliding between the broken trunks like smoke given intent.
He learned to recognize their arrival before seeing them.
The forest reacted first.
The air tightened. Sounds dulled. Even the ash seemed to settle differently, as if gravity itself hesitated.
When they were small enough—if that word even applied—he could survive.
He never fought them.
Instead, he used the forest.
He learned where the ground gave way beneath the dead trunks, where centuries of collapse had formed sudden voids. He learned which blackened pillars leaned just enough that a shove, a stone, a desperate push of his shoulder could send them crashing down.
Once, something followed him too closely.
He ran—not fast, but with purpose—straight toward one of the marked zones. The forbidden places, the ones carved into the stone with frantic warnings in dead languages.
The creature hesitated.
That moment was enough.
It stepped where the ground was thin, and the forest swallowed it whole. The sound it made on the way down stayed with him for days.
Other times, he led them there on purpose.
Toward places where even the abominations refused to linger. Toward spaces that felt watched. Toward shadows that bent the air around them.
Fear, he learned, was not exclusive to humans.
But sometimes…
Sometimes something passed through the forest that was not meant to be seen.
There was no warning drawing for those.
No mark. No advice.
Just presence.
The first time it happened, he felt it before he understood it. A pressure, immense and sudden, like standing too close to a storm that had decided to notice him. His thoughts scattered. His vision blurred.
He never saw the creature clearly.
He saw its effect.
The trees bent—not physically, but conceptually. Shadows twisted into impossible angles. His heartbeat stuttered, then raced, then slowed dangerously.
His legs gave out.
He woke hours later, alone, soaked in cold sweat, his ears ringing.
It happened again. And again.
Sometimes days apart. Sometimes weeks.
Each time, the aftermath was worse. Longer confusion. Stronger nausea. A lingering sense that something had looked back.
He began to understand.
There were things here that hunted.
And there were things that simply passed through, indifferent to him in the way a mountain is indifferent to an ant.
Those were the worst.
Because there was nothing he could do but fall, black out, and hope they moved on.
And they always did.
So far.