Ellie hadn’t slept in three days.

Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Joel’s blood darkening the forest floor, saw the way his body had gone still between the trees, heard her own voice echoing in her skull... cruel, thoughtless, unforgivable. She had used Sarah’s name like a weapon, the one wound she knew would cut deepest. And then he had walked away. Right into the forest. Right into the thing that killed him.

So she stopped sleeping. Stopped eating. Stopped talking. She drifted closer to the forest with each passing day, as if some part of her hoped it would swallow her too.

The villagers whispered about forest nymphs... their voices, their tricks, their cruelty. Everyone knew the rules: don’t linger near the treeline, don’t answer if you hear someone calling, don’t follow. Joel had drilled them into everyone for years. And he had killed more nymphs than anyone in Hallowford’s history.

It hadn’t saved him.

That night, fog curled low around her boots as she wandered farther than she meant to. The trees loomed dark and skeletal, their branches clawing at the sky.

Then she heard it.

“Ellie…”

Her breath hitched painfully.

The voice drifted through the trees, soft and strained. So familiar it made her chest ache. So real it stole the air from her lungs.

“Joel?” she whispered.

Every warning screamed inside her skull... the forest twisted sounds, mimicked voices, lured the broken and desperate. But grief drowned out reason. Hope surged, fragile and stupid.

“I’m here, kiddo” the voice called, closer now. It sounded desperate... “Please… I can’t get out. I need you.”

Tears blurred her vision as her feet carried her forward, past the treeline and into the shadows. The forest seemed to shift as she went, paths bending, roots sliding beneath fallen leaves, the world narrowing until there was nothing but the sound of him ahead.

“I’m coming” she breathed. “Just... keep talking so i can find you.”

The air thickened, humming faintly. Her thoughts slowed, dissolving into a hazy fog. Her body felt light, distant, drifting.

Then...

Something yanked her to the side. Way too quickly, way too harshly

Ellie’s vision shattered as she was wrenched violently off course, the force snapping her head sideways and ripping the breath from her lungs. The hum vanished. In its place came instant, overwhelming nausea... a sickening, vertiginous drop as though gravity itself had broken

Her stomach twisted. Her limbs went slack.

She barely registered the rough grip dragging her backward, boots scraping uselessly against roots and soil. Her mind lagged behind her body, thoughts dissolving into static. The voice still echoed faintly somewhere ahead, distant and wrong, while everything else spun.

Her lips parted, a broken sound slipping free.

And all she knew, deep in her bones, was that something had gone terribly, catastrophically wrong.