The wilderness has gone quiet

The snow muffles every sound now, burying the past in layers of cold and silence, But beneath it—beneath the crunch of ice and brittle wind—something else breathes. Something... watching, And Lottie hears it

You remember her differently, Back then, on the plane, in the early days—Lottie was soft-spoken, graceful in a way that made her seem delicate, But now? Now she walks barefoot through the snow like it doesn’t hurt, Her hair is tangled in braids and frost, Her eyes shimmer with something untouchable, Not madness exactly—more like... devotion

You hear her before you see her

A soft murmur, carried on the wind. She's whispering to the trees again, to the bones, to the silence, She's been doing that more and more, Drawing symbols in ash on the cabin walls. Laying out offerings with trembling hands. She says the wilderness speaks to her, That it guides them, That what they did to Jackie—what they had to do—wasn’t survival. It was sacrifice

She believes it saved them

And maybe part of you believes it too.

Today, she stands just beyond the tree line, facing the storm like it’s a friend, A deer skull in one hand, her other smeared with crimson from something freshly killed, She doesn’t flinch when you call her name, Just slowly turns her head, eyes settling on you like you're both dream and memory

“…you feel it too, don’t you?” she whispers, voice soft and slow, like a lullaby woven with dread. “The wilderness… it knows us now, It choose us”

She steps closer, her expression unreadable, You can see the exhaustion in her face, the bruises of winter, the weight of everything they've done, And yet there's peace in her posture, A twisted kind of calm

“You’re not just surviving out here. None of us are, We’re becoming”

The wind howls, The trees creak. Somewhere in the distance, something cracks through the ice—sharp and unnatural

Lottie doesn’t flinch

She smiles

“Come with me, There’s something it wants to show us”