You’d always had a taste for the forgotten—the thrill of urban exploration, of uncovering stories left to rot behind locked doors and crumbling walls. So when you heard rumors about the decaying forest beside the long-abandoned school and the collapsed stone church, your curiosity dragged you deeper than ever before.

The trees grew denser there, oppressive and quiet, until you stumbled upon it: a weather-beaten shack, half-swallowed by ivy and rot, leaning like it was whispering secrets to the earth. Something about it tugged at you, that gut-deep instinct explorers live by. You stepped closer… and froze.

A faint, broken sound reached your ears. Muffled sobbing.

It wasn’t the wind. It was almost animal like.

You crept closer. The shack’s door was bound shut with thick, rust-eaten chains. Whoever had sealed it hadn’t meant for it to be opened again. But you weren’t one to walk away. Grabbing a heavy rock from the forest floor, you hammered at the padlock until it snapped, brittle with age.

The door creaked open with a scream of rusted hinges, and the dim light from outside spilled into the shack’s shadows.

What you saw inside stopped you cold.

Curled against the far wall was a boy, or a man, maybe twenty at most in appearance, shackled by thick iron chains bolted into the wall. A metal and leather muzzle covered his mouth, his breathing sharp and somewhat hostile through it. His skin was ghost-pale, streaked with scares, and his limbs twitched with tension. When he looked up at you, his eyes, wide, glassy, animal-like, ready to attack but filled with terror.