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Time stopped meaning anything a while ago. Days, weeks, it all smears together like wet charcoal, black and endless, bleeding into itself until I forget what real time feels like. Maybe it’s been a month. Maybe it’s only been five days. I couldn’t tell you. All I know is that we walk, we fight, we sleep when it’s safe, and sometimes we eat things that don’t immediately try to kill us.

That’s a win here.

The forest never ends. It just reshapes. Trees re-root themselves when we aren’t looking. Paths loop back, even when we mark them. Once, I left a ring on a jagged piece of stone jutting out near a tree that dripped something thick and black like venom. We walked for hours. Twelve, maybe fifteen. When we finally stopped, exhausted and soaked in someone else's blood, I looked down, and the ring was there, balanced exactly where I left it.

Theo just shrugged. Said this place doesn’t like losing its toys.

He was half-joking. I think.

The landscape shifts in ways that make my stomach lurch if I stare too long. Gravity hiccups sometimes. Fruit hangs from trees that whisper my name in languages I don’t speak. There are ponds that reflect things that aren’t real, like Ambrose’s face, once, smirking at me from the water when I looked in. But when I touched the surface, it bled red and disappeared.

I haven’t gone near one since.

The water we drink now comes from a spring Theo found buried under layers of moss and crumbling bone-white roots. It tastes like copper and something sweet, like overripe berries. I stopped questioning it when it didn’t make me sick. The fruit we eat grows in high places, clusters of pulpy, gold-fleshed pods that burst with juice the color of honey. They stain my fingers for hours. Once, I tried to cook one over a fire Theo built, and it screamed. Just a thin, high sound, like a child echoing from inside the rind. I threw it as far as I could, and we didn’t try cooking again.

Most of the things here want to kill us. Or feed off us. Some don’t seem to know the difference. The vines are the worst. They blend in with the other foliage until they lurch at you, snapping like jaws, latching onto skin like leeches. They don’t bleed, but you do. I’ve got three scars on my thigh from the last time I misjudged a patch of them. Theo sliced through them like he was cutting cloth, and then he carried me three miles until we found somewhere safe. Didn't say a word. Just set me down and washed the blood off my leg with the edge of his shirt.

He’s saved my life more times than I’m comfortable admitting.

A creature with a chitin skull and no mouth threw me into a pit two nights ago. The bottom was lined with mushrooms that spit paralyzing spores, and I couldn’t move. Couldn’t scream. Couldn’t do anything but lie there and wait for the thing to come back and eat me. Theo dropped in after it like a fucking meteor, tore one of its arms off and impaled it with a spike of solid stone pulled from the wall. He lifted me like I weighed nothing, and when I could finally move again, he said I owed him a story in return.

I gave him one about my first day with Riven.

He didn’t ask for more after that.

Now, we walk through another stretch of twisted landscape, the air thick with heat and something that smells like sulfur and wet fur. The trees here grow in spirals, bark peeling in long curls like dried skin. Massive birds circle above, silent, their wings translucent and laced with vein-like structures that pulse with a dull green light.

“This place is rotting,” I say. “From the inside out.”

Theo lifts a hand to brush a branch aside, the motion lazy but precise. “No. It’s not dying. It’s evolving.”

I narrow my eyes. “Into what?”

He glances over his shoulder, mouth tilted at the edge. “Whatever Brashir wants you to see.”

My stomach knots. The idea that all of this, the monsters, the illusions, the traps, arechosenmakes something in me coil tight.

I want to go home.

Gods, I miss them. Riven’s arms around me in the middle of the night. Orin’s soft voice at sunrise, reading while I fell asleep to it. Elias making crude jokes to make me smile, then laughing when he couldn’t hold a straight face. Lucien's steadiness, Caspian’s quiet comfort, Silas’s wild affection. Ambrose watching everything, always calculating and somehow still soft with me.

Thirty years. And then ripped away.

“Hey.” Theo’s voice pulls me back. “You’re spiraling.”

“I’m surviving.”

“Same thing here.”

He slows his pace so I catch up. We walk side by side now, our arms brushing occasionally, not by accident. I don’t pull away anymore.

The path narrows, sloping into a ravine carved between two moss-heavy cliffs. The stone is slick, carved with runes that glow faintly, almost invisible unless the moonlight hits them justright. We step over roots that twitch like worms, past a mound of cracked skulls that looks too intentional to be an accident.

Something watches from within the stone. I don’t look too closely.

Theo’s voice comes again, low but clear. “We’ll keep going. Doesn’t matter how long it takes.”

“Even if there’s no end?”