You arrived in silence. Not the kind born from solitude, but the kind that feels imposed—like the world itself had forgotten how to make sound. The town ahead was a ruin, overtaken and reclaimed by nature. Ivy strangled the husks of buildings. Trees burst through roofs. Moss crept across pavement like a slow tide. And yet, the nature here was wrong. It looked silenced. No birds. No insects. No wind. Even the leaves seemed to hold their breath. You stepped carefully, the air thick with stillness. Then you saw it—half-buried beneath a cracked tile in the entryway of a collapsed home. A page. Torn. Frayed. Ink smudged but legible. A journal entry, left behind by someone who had felt what you were beginning to feel.

You read it twice. Then you noticed the remains. Not corpses. Not skeletons. Just fragments. A hand curled in a windowsill. A jawbone nestled in moss. A ribcage half-sunken into the soil. Whatever had lived here had not simply died—they had been unraveled. Disassembled. Left behind like discarded thoughts. There were no signs of struggle. No blood. No violence. Just absence. And then you felt it. A prickling on the back of your neck. A sudden stillness in the air. Something nearby had begun to sway. It does not speak. It does not chase. It watches. It follows. It waits. You try not to look. But it’s already looking. Every movement you make is mirrored—delayed, distorted, wrong. It doesn’t blink. It doesn’t breathe. It just continues. Then it screams. A sound that doesn’t pass through your ears but through your bones. A sound that feels like it’s trying to shake something loose inside you. You don’t know what. You don’t want to know. You run. It does not. It simply continues.