The silence after Tree Grave stretched too long. Insects had vanished. Only the slow drag of moisture through buried roots broke the hush
Arion crouched until the tremor in his arms eased. Ahead, the world shimmered pale blue: light spilling through fog in long, wavering shafts. The air carried a faint metallic tang that coated the back of his throat and refused to leave.
He stood up and pulled out the journal. The next page had swollen from damp, yet the ink held.
‘You will slowly transition into the Blue Forest of Mist.’
‘Do not linger by the fungus on the trees.’
‘Avoid the heavy mist. It causes—’
Step… crack… step…
A sound sliced the air—sharp, like footsteps on glass. He frowned, glanced up. Nothing but blue fog curling between fungus-lit trunks.
When he looked back, the words had changed.
‘A?v?o?i?d? ?t?h?e? ?h?e?a?v?y? ?—
Don’t. Avoid. The. Mist.’
‘I?t? ?B?r?I?n?G?s? ?H?a?P?P?i?N?e?S?S?.’
‘LET.? ?I?T?.? ?E?M?B?R?A?C?E?.? YOU.?’
The letters slid and reformed in wet, jerking strokes, as if an invisible hand had only just finished writing.
He stared. A cold tingle raced down his spine.
“Right,” he whispered, voice flat. “That’s not odd at all.”
He turned the page. Blank—then fresh lines formed, shaky and uneven:
‘THEY R?E?M?E?M?B?E?R?R?R?.?’
The forest pulsed in time with the words.
Something moved beyond the fog.
A shape.
Then a voice.
“Arion.”
His name arrived not as sound but as vibration, rippling the mist in perfect rings.
He spun. A figure stood half-visible ahead, barely a couple foot off the ground—grey silhouette, hands limp at its sides, head bowed.
He took one involuntary step forward before instinct slammed him still.
“That’s… impossible.”
The outline tilted its head.
“You’re gone,” he said louder.
Stillness.
“But. I’m. ?h?e?e?e?r?e?…?’?
The figure spoke in an inhuman stutter, twitching with every syllable, as though it were learning speech from a broken recording.
“Why d?i?d?n?’?t? you find M?E??? I was… in so much.––?P?A?I?N?N?.?N?.?”.?”
No… I tried. I spent weeks. I—
“Stop fucking with me—you’re not real!”
He snapped his wrist. Ice erupted—sudden, savage. A frozen flower exploded where the figure had stood.
From the corner of his eye, movement. A woman’s frame folded into focus: pale hair streaked with eerie light, eyes hollow and shining.
His chest seized. “Mum?”
The figure smiled without warmth. “W???hy??-? why??-?w??h???y?? ??-w??hy did you l?e?a?v?e? ?m?e?e?e???”
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The words came from the mist itself, skipping like a broken record
Behind him another voice joined—fainter, higher. Then more. Dozens. Swelling from every direction until the air thickened with them.
YOU. LEFT.
Y?O?U?.? ?F?O?R?G?O?T?T?E?N?.?
G?A?I?N?.? FREEDOM.
LEFT. ONLY. P?A?I?N?.?
SUFFERING.
D?A?M?N?A?T?I?O?N?.?
BETRAYED.
HEARTLESS.
MURDERER.
Each accusation hit deep inside, the voices braided together until sound became weight, hammering through his skull.
The forest darkened further.
He staggered, palms clamped over his ears.
“STOP!”
Figures multiplied in the blue fog no matter where he looked. He wrenched his head down and squeezed his eyes shut. The voices only swelled, braiding into one relentless tone that drilled through marrow.
His mother’s voice rose above them—clear, accusing.
“You. Let. Us. ?D?I?E?—
D?I?E?.?.?’?
D?I?E?EEE.?’?”
White bursts flared behind his eyes as teeth grinded. Vitalis ignited under his skin like liquid fire desperate for release.
Temperature plummeted. Heat died.
Tsk. Crack-CRACK!
He roared—raw, animal, every buried grief tearing free at once.
BOOM!
The ground detonated. Ice exploded outward in a perfect, shattering ring, ripping through roots and fog alike. For one frozen heartbeat the voices crystallised, then shattered.
The mist recoiled—then surged back, heavier, clinging to the earth like grave soil.
…
When the shards settled, only drifting frost remained. The voices had vanished. Arion’s hands shook violently. For a moment he believed he had gone deaf; sound had been swallowed whole.
Tss.
The mist hung motionless.
Then the cracking began. White noise flooded his ears, replaced by his own hammering heartbeat, then the ragged saw of his breathing.
He dropped to one knee, chest heaving, condensation beading on his lashes. Spores that had once drifted now rained down as tiny ice crystals in lazy spirals around him. Frost steamed from his palms. The journal lay face-down nearby, half-frozen to the soil.
He pried it free. The ink had warped again, fresh sentences bled across the page as though unseen fingers brushed over it.
‘YOU WERE ALONE.’
‘YOU LEFT THEM.’
‘BUT.’
‘YOU CAN STAY HERE.’
‘THEY CAN BE ONE WITH YOU’
He slammed it shut, jaw clenched until his teeth ached.
Quiet returned—thin, fragile. He could hear his pulse echoing like machinery winding down. Strangely peaceful.
He leaned against the nearest trunk. The bark was slick; cold seeped straight through to bone. His voice emerged hoarse.
“They’re gone.”
Yet I'm here. What if—
A treacherous sliver of hope flickered anyway.
No. Don’t.
For a moment, there was silence. Then the forest creaked again.
The mist finally thinned. He could not say how much time had passed.
He hesitated, then forced the journal open again, thumbing back to the original page. The handwriting had returned—calm, even, almost mocking.
‘Avoid the heavy mist.’
‘It causes hallucinations.’
‘Their sins. Death. Love. Trauma.’
‘Don’t linger, otherwise it will cause madness.’
Fresh lines gouged themselves beneath, desperate and jagged:
‘DON’T LET IT GET HOLD OF YOU.’
‘YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO LEAVE.’
His grip tightened until the spine creaked.
“FUCK!”
The shout vanished into the fog without echo. He hurled the book at the ground. “Then you should’ve led with that, you bastard!”
“Fucking idiot…” he snarled at the absent writer.
The sound went nowhere.
He slumped against the trunk, breathing hard from fury more than fear. The canopy glowed faint blue above him, spores drifting like slow ash. For the first time since arriving in this world he felt small—merely human, another creature inside a vast, indifferent machine.
The forest waited, mute and patient.
After a long while he pushed upright, retrieved the journal, and brushed frost and dirt from its cover. As he lowered it, broken shards of ice mirrored his face: bloodshot eyes, colourless skin, a half-grin twisted by exhaustion.
“Definitely a hallucination,” he muttered. “Even my reflection looks like shit.”
He flipped to earlier notes, voice half-aloud, grounding himself in facts.
“Fungal neurotoxins—spore-based. Probably airborne… the mist? Reacts with Vitalis… maybe.”
The sound of his own analysis anchored him.
“Fungus-induced trance state,” he continued, quieter now, almost conversational. “Keeps prey docile. Feeds on metabolic slowdown, converts Vitalis into nutrition—or just consumes the person itself.”
He wiped condensation from the page with his sleeve. “It was fungus messing with your brain, dumbass.”
His tone dropped further. “There’s nothing in this reality that’s going to bring them back.”
He stood in the dim light until the ache behind his eyes dulled, then began to walk.
The mist thinned in patches. Through fading blue he glimpsed stone blocks swallowed by earth, runes carved too deep to read. The ground firmed beneath his boots.
He stopped once—turned slightly, not all the way.
Far behind, two figures stood in the last haze of mist. Too distant for features. Only silhouettes. Watching.
Neither moved.
He blinked. They dissolved into colour.
The fog folded over the space they had occupied, sealing it clean.
Arion squared his shoulders, exhaled once, and set off toward the faint outline of a toppled obelisk ahead—its cracked point aimed deeper into the forest where the ruins waited.
The hum of the Blue Forest faded into a silence that was not empty.
Only waiting for its next unfortunate victim.
