Speaker 1: I arrived at the lip of the hollow with a
small roll of brittle rulls folded into my palm like
pro beads, and a weight that felt less like instruction
than obligation. The first roll that settled under my skin
was lesser sentence than a cold pressure. Do not give
the forest your certainty. It read as if a hand
had pressed a thumb across masternum and left in a
print of warning that, injunction, felt like a mirror's caution.
Tranceplanted into bark and urge to hold the reflexes that
had kept me alive in ordinary places, and instead to
cultivate a careful, almost shameful that to give the forest certainty,
a sensed was to hand it an edge with which
it could carve view into its grammar. The edge where
the hollow began was not dramatic so much as intimate
and narrow, l in forreaded by narve roots and low
loping branches that stitched the sky into patchwork slit. The
light at dust blowed a blue that seemed less made
of color than of temperature. It felt carved rather than falling.
The coolness that sat on the skin like a thought
sound thinned as if someone had turned a page. Distant
claimer became a suggestion rather than fact, and the world
contracted into the smallness of chosen ver section. I checked
the rolled parchment until my thumb graze the frayed edge,
and began to trust the inkers, one trust in old
wound by touch and a memorized age. The rules read
like a map of contradictions, each line offering careful cancil
bound to a cruelty of omission. They were all I had,
besides a battered compass that shivered in my hand like
a frightened bird, its needle flicking with the indecisiveness of
someone who had lost the habit of pointing true north.
Crossing the last visible endmark unoverturned like in coated stone,
felt like stepping for a seam in clothes you had
been wearing forever. When my foot passed beyond it, the
world behind me thinn and the way memory thins were seeding,
less substantial, no longer wholly reliable. The comberss refused the
steady bearing it had once promised. Its needle flirted into
sivily were directions, and then spun a small animal unerved.
The first hullow lane swallowed sound into leaf and root,
excising the outside's noisy certainties and trading them for whisper.
My rules remained like warm things in my pocket I
could press against my ribs. Each instruction fluttered with usefulness
and with an animal band toward trap. Guidance and snare
felt like twins. Here the forest shepherded and devoiled with
the same breath. Bark opened like pages. Trunks wore carved
letters not of veins and fishers, shaping names into sentences
that reorganized themselves according to where and how I looked.
At first, the letters were fragments, single loops, a curl
of an initial seen resolving into names. If I let
my eye slide along the shadow and found a vantage
point the trees seemed to offer. I learned to read
the bark by stepping into pockets of shade and allowing
trunks to rearrange their faces at the margin of my vision.
One name arranged itself into pattern that looked like the
guide's handwriting, thin, hurried edges, like a person who mut
steps from memory rather than ink. For a split second,
I believed the hollow was telling me precisely where they
had gone, then pinned to a low branch, like a
cruel annotation. A rule contradicted the promise do not follow
the spoken names. The contradiction hung there, undeniable and insoluble,
like a second moon caf from a notice board. There
was a fork where the rout split, a living choice
sculptured of roofs that typed up. My boots were paused
some one window wood. I could not tell had struck
a tor and ruled there with a thorn predicted A
scrap of maps stitch to the guide's sleeve. The matting
suggested a left turn. The rule, its letters, blunt with
uncompromising calm, urged me to continue straight. The hollow read
it disagreement as a question to be answered, rather than
an instruction to be arbitrated. I felt each rule like
an act of presence. An agent with its own appetite
instructions could fold the path about themselves. The very act
of choosing seemed to make the well chained shape decisions.
Here were negotiations conducted in our language that did not
think in human terms. When I chose, when I turned
left against the rule, pin by the form, the path
behind me sealed, as if someone had soon it closed,
roots rose and braided where my footprints had been, and
afterward formed of everth. The earth beckoned is of stitch shut.
I turned once, fingers still pressed to the parchment, and
saw nothing but a unbroken laces of root and the
faint cold of which the world had been. Panic is small, sharp,
and focused. It arrows perception to the rule under your thumb.
The idea of retreat, once as simple as stepping back
across a line, became a fiction commitment. By contrast, acquired
the weight of gravity. Each step, for now carried a
cosset would not lift until the hollow had settled its account.
There was a softness the forest offers before it demands.
In a hollowed trunk, I found a loose brass bou
nestled in mass, like a promise given reluctantly, beside a
clunger torn corner of the guide's map, Its fibers rough
against the wood, as that the tree had kept it
for safekeeping. The bell's metal was warm, as if someone
else had held it recently. The tier in the map's
corner matched to cut my fingers near by muscle memory,
I let the bell ring. Once inside the trunk its
sound trembled into the bark and returned in a caidence
that felt almost like laughter, a private echo. It was
proof and lure at once. So often hope is the
bit that asks to be led toward the hook, and
I felt the subtle seduction, how yearning can guide you
into the jaws of the very thing he seek to
pry open. The rule I would break was simple and
in can catastrophic. In effect, do not pursue the names
when they call you. It forbade precisely the motion my
grief insisted on making. When the guide's name unfold in
the bark, letters blooming into visible trail light folding a
round leaf, and would like a warm hem. I follow
the ground, shifted under my boots, midlight along ated and
snapped back like a falsalum. Branches reckoned themselves behind me.
I understood then, right into the marrow, that the rules
were not inertive eyes, but a kind of weather, something
to be weathered, or weaponry to be welded. My choice
of pursuit bent to hollow into a channel I could
not step away from. Consequence tasted like iron and wet
mosse in my mouth. After the clearing rearranged itself around
my passage. I found in my palm a small shod
of cracked hand mirror, and the guard's bell loop was
string around my fingers. The mirror's glass gave back reflections
that lagged blinking a breath before me. It offered the
wrong face's answer to my stair. Holding the shod felt
like touching memory through gas, sharp and insulated at once.
The bell, now tied to my wrist, kept time with
a private rhythm that thirded through the hollows chaos and
turned it faintly navigable. The evidence of the guard's passage
felt at once like vindication and indictment. I had the
proof to continue, but I had paid a toll in certainty.
Forest had not surrendered the person I sought, so much
as what one allusion for another. Yew carry traces of
others into places that changed them, and those traces come
back altered. In the thin eyes. Before dawned, the hollow
tightened as if it were drawing breath. Shells folded into
one another, light compressed into bands that lay like thready
ribbons in the ground. I slept with my back against
an elder trunk. The rolled parchment opened like a small
book of law across my knees. Dreams in the hollow
are not RESTful. They are negotiations conducted in the shallow
logic of a place that prefers the ambiguous. I dreamed
of doors opening where there it had been only bark,
of maps bleeding into skin, with the guide shadow moving
just out of reach, and sometimes sitting where I should
have expected. At least when I woke the map corner
I had found seen more complete, as if the night
had stitched a missing notch to the paper. The match
to crack by your route. There was a fold in
the terrain. The guide's map now oddly suggested I follow.
The forest listens to the way you justify yourself. I
rehearsed reasons for continuing, painless, efficient rationals, until my breath
sounded like an edict. Guilt folded into penance, until motive
and instrument blurred what had sent me and had become
the means that would keep me there. Trees murmur names
as where the murmurs leaves constant, indifferent, capable of cruelty
without malice. When a trace carved letters, I noticed some
were recent but would still tender where it had been
re arranged, sap had not yet sealed the incision. One
name matched the slant and pressure of the guy's map.
Another spelled something that felt almost like threat. The hollow
kept both. It kept persons in their absences with equal care.
Has in the hollower, not paved of dirt, but of decision.
Each fork is a grammar. Examine each step an inflection point.
I learned to read the land as punctuation, a sudden
route like a colma, a ring of stones, parentheses that,
once entered, re arranged the sentence of your progress. At
a bend, I found a shallow pull that reflected not
the sky, but a wrong shadow, a reflection that hinted
of future states rather than at the past. I not
unheld the mere shoar to the surface instead of my
own face. A pair of ies watched back that were
not mine, ancient and patient. The reflection moved at its
own temper, and the water side like a living thing, answering.
A call to look was to be called further. I
closed my eyes and felt the memory of the compass
needle lining up with the name I had once thought
lost to, Following the bell's faint chime, as if it
were the only true enuf left to me, a private rhythm,
threading the Hollow's disorder into something like rout bock. Names
rearranged themselves into phrases that suggested direction, words that wanted
to be read a strategy. At times the rules and
the bell contradicted one another, at times they mimicked each other.
My mind kept allege a catalog in trust, in betrayal.
I began to speak the rules aloud in fragments, not
to invoke them, but to test where the sun altered
their meaning. The Hollow answered by moving more quietly, as
if listening back, re arranging its punctuation in a whisper
to a minute clearing, I found more complete evidence of
the Guide's presence, a torn stitch of cloth caught on
a thorn, the faint puffume of crushed up still clinging
to fibers, and in print on soft earth, like a
set of footprints that led decisively to nowhere. The Guide's
mark had the warmth of human intent and the chill
of something abandoned mid task. I held the torn cloth
to my face and smelled soundal with an ember smoke,
and for long while I allowed myself the thought that
the guide might have left willingly, that whatever compelled them
might have held a reason beyond my ken u fragile
consolation A carried like a small lamp into the denso dark.
Breaking the rule had consequences that round passed the immediate
and obvious. The hollst geometry stopped being merely misleading and
began to write memory against me. The map in my
hands would change order. When I looked away, what I
thought settled would rearrange itself, like a book someone had
thumbed through the rules themselves shifted phrases were locating inside sentences,
so that when I consulted deparchment a second later, a
different command presented itself. I tried to anchor the ink
with a pin, to make language stubborn with brass, but
the charm skirts marched or corrected itself in a new direction,
as if the words wanted to be read another way.
The forest does not forget your errors. It keeps some
on display, as examples in his warnings. As pre dawn
eased the night, the trail we constituted into a corridor
I had not expected. Roots rose and braided into walls,
until the space had the density of a hallway. And
in the hush I found small comforts I had brought
with me, the compass, which at last held still with
a tiredness more like acceptance than faith. The brass bell
ring now measure to my pulse. The roll parchment, its
edges mudged with the forest soil. Where I half expected
the guide to wait, I found only the trace of
their having passed a mirror shod, catching wrong light and
curving it into a smile that was mine. The impression
of a coast sleeve snacked at a branch, and then
further on atoft of hair that might have belonged to
nothing or to some one. The sense of pursuit shifted
into an understanding that the hollow shaped both the chase
and the chaser in equal measure. I lingered at the
trail's edge, listening to the bells echo in my chest
into the slow respiration of bark. The evidence I carried,
shod bell, map fragment was enough to prove the guide
had veneer, and that the pursuit continued. But proof in
the hollow was provisional. It does not close, but summons.
It is not resolution but invitation. I felt less like
a rescuer and more like a current following a channel
the forest had carved from me. The rolls in my
pocket rustled when the wind moved, a susuration of possibilities
and threats in the same breath. Morning came as a
cold blue washed through thin lanes and long shadows. The
hollow did not relent with daylight. It rephrased itself in sentences,
Folded tight and new. I folded the parchment, carefully, storing
the map fragment back in the satchel. Its edges soft
from being read and re read. I wrapped the mirror
shod in cloth and placed it face him, or to
keep its lacking reflections from catching my eye. I listened
to the trees for the names they might offer. Next.
The guide's name rose, sometimes like a stray soum, sometimes
a choked whisper. Yet the forest vocabulary remained mercilessly plural,
loss gone waiting. The path had narrowed until the sense
of being shepherd had tightened into an undeniable knowledge. I
had opened a door in a place that does not
like being opened, and stepping back through that seem was
no longer an option. When I left the clearing, the
shape of choicettled into me as a kind of permanent thing,
as if the action had altered the anatomy of decision
inside my chest. I had broken the rule I had
paid for the proof. The world I moved through now
bore the calculus of their transaction. There was no triumph.
There was only the thin comfort of motion and the
long shadow of what I had done. The Hollow had
consumed certainty and returned me another hunger, an ongoing appetite
frantz as the place might never concede. I walked because
there was nothing else honest to do. Each step answered
the last. Each rule was a falsil I dug up,
and then perversely a false. So I placed back, re arranged.
If the Hollow had a mind, A seen to keep
her of the keeper, and they kept with equal care.
My only compass now was the bell's distant child. That
my only map, the small eroding fragment stitch to the
guard's leave. The Hollow charged a price for each forward
motion I had, in a kind of reverent recklessness, accepted
a contract. At the chapter's close, with pre dnvalg rollings,
low and deliberate, like a hand across exposed roots, I
stood at the edge of a trail that had not
existed an io before. The forest's voice was patient and dry,
rehearsing its names the way as Galla might test a memory.
I had the shard to bell. The map traces the
promise continuation more than rescue. I gathered my things and
felt underneath everything, the steady, quiet knowledge that this was
not an ending. The rules were not finished with me.
Their grammar was only beginning to take me apart. I
stepped forward as the trees whispered names, one of the
mine and one of them the guides, and I went
on into the hollow because there was no other honest
movement left to make. This was at the end. Dusk
fell like a bruise along the edge of the hollow,
thickening the air into a color I could name only
in move woods. The trail narrowed, folded between trunks that
leaned close as if to listen. Their bark was a
talkative skin, flacking and wet with the breath of evening.
I kept my hands in the roll parchment, because the
scroll was the only thing that still told me how
to move. A thin plane of rules curling at the
edges with travel smudges and ink I could no longer trust.
It had become a liturgy. I mounted with my thumb
a set of shapes that steaded my hands when my
head threatened to tilt into panic. The trees murmured names
I almost recognized, and then shuffled them away, embarrassed by
the memory, as if the very sound of people could
make the hollow blush. I found. The first mark were
roots braided into the path, a fresh gouge pressed into bark,
letters jagged and horrid. Some one had carved and named
after a breath. Some one else had crossed it out.
The cross letters sat there, like a question left open
for me alone. The guide's name had been there, and
the crossing out was frantic, the lines as if the
hand that struck for it had been pulled back med gesture.
The violent hesitation in those strokes made the name for
your both present and exile, as if the force could
not decide whether to claim the person or to erase them.
It was a contradiction that kept me from turning back.
One rule in the scroll said to trust the marks
at the forest. Another, in a different hand and on
a different strip of vellum, said never to trust the
forest trust. I sat on a cold stone and rubbed
my thumb along the scroll's edge, and tell the papery
fipe is whispered under my skin. Rules are supposed to
reduce a wall to a narrow lane of certainty. Here
they arrived in pairs. The posing teeth that gnawed at
the same loaf. To obey one was often to break another,
and that breakage had the shape of a moral geometry.
I had not learned to navigate. The old acted like
an inexorable compass. It had been grafted into me by
the way. The guide had held a bell on a
small chain, soft measured apologies in metal. The guide had
been a warmth in a hollow place, measured kryptic, saying
a little bit meany more. The absence of that bell
tied in my chest, until every breath felt like an
unpaid debt. I unrolled the parchment and read line by
line a list of small coders that promised safety with threat,
depending on how they were held. One fragile line instructed
me to keep to the cove trail. The next insisted
that carved trails or traps and must be left. A
marginal note added its own dissonance. If you can still
name yourself, do not follow the named. I stood on
a sliver of ground where theying tonstructions argued across my palms.
Each choice felt like folding a knife inward, necessary for use,
dangerous when opened. Twilight turned trunks into columns of shadow,
and she the forest narrowing above into a folded ceiling
of leaves so dense that swallowed the sky. The light
became an impossible blue, cold and cinematic, despite the damp
heat seeping from mass and lum. I held the compass
because it was a thing that pointed, even if the
pointing could be full by enchantment or by my own
exhausted hands. The scroll script shifted under my thumb, re
arranging into phrasing I did not remember writing. A sentence
might resolve into a different sentence. If I blinked a cough.
It was a minor madness, no louder than a mouth waging.
But in such confidence, a familiar footfall behind me might
have been my own earlier step, folded back into the world,
as if the hollow could seem time into knots, pass
folded as if punished for wrong thinking, an instruction that
had once road followed the ring of roots at dusk,
later instructed never followed growing roots at night. The contradiction
carved choices out of my moving skin. At a route
carve glade, the guide's presence reached me like a bruise,
though as the scent of a person, even when no
person stood there. A sleeve torn and stitch hung from
a protruding root. A map ciphered to the fabricouldink that
had blared into the weaf to look like veins. Whoever
I had left it, the guide had traced their steps
there and left a language only half decufpherable. The map's
marks fit into the hollow of memory, like keys that
almost turned, small circles, arrows, like tiny accusation marks, a
loop with three crosses, and a phrase I could not translate,
but felt in my teeth like bone. I smelled sandalwood
when I touched the cloth. The faint ember of a
fire that might have been weeks and minutes ago. Town
did not register hear as it had anywhere else. The
guide's handwriting was careful and tiny letters like place footfalls,
and they assured me that some one had walked here
with purpose before disappearing into whatever account in the hollow
conducted night settled like a late The air tightened, the
hush between trees felt crowded with breathless things that hovered
just beyond seeing. In a ring of slick bark, I
found the still poor, black and perfect, cupped up by roots.
If the forest had made a hand to hold its reflection.
My face met me there in the well, blurred a
cinematic plane of gold, blue light, and film grain. Then
the reflection blame before I did. For a heartbeat, my
eyes moved ahead of my body, and in the impossible offset,
I felt the rule slip from guidance into test. The
reflection made a motion in the world had not expected.
I watched my own people's star light and lockstep with
a cushion that was not mine. Yet it was a small,
impossible event, an offset in the clockwork of being, and
it made the rules feel less like a map drawn
for me and more like a paper exam written in
some one else's handwriting. I pressed my finger tips of
the curl of parchment and searched for a name for
the sensation. It was not only that the hollow read me,
It was that it read to parts of me that
had not yet taken shape, the near future of my
thoughts and the outlines of decisions I would regret. The
rules were not history, they were questions. I felt the
world re arrange in small increments. The path behind me
grew within and then unaveled, as if it had been
sketched on fark. I turned and washed the trail and
make itself each for ful I had taken, dissolving into
mass with the softness and inevitability of a promise. Broken,
the ink and the skull re arranged again, letters MC,
grading into phrases I had not written, as if the
map in the forest conspired to turn me into something obedient,
to re letter my will into their ledger. A belt
shined above or perhaps within me, a high, tiny sound,
like a seam ripping in the sky. When I looked up,
I saw it for a moment, the brightlink cut between
branches like a trophy, like sunlight colored metal. It winked
and was gone when moved in tight intentional currents that
carried names. A whisper thread past my ear and shaped
itself into a syllable that resembled my own name, but
was off by a shaddoer. It culled away, as if
embarrassed to have tried. The guide. Map fragment stitched to
the sleeve trembled in my hands and bled into another
map I had kept folded in Masatchel. The seams of
the two maps matched like the edges of a broken promise.
Together they pointed deeper into the hollow, but each point
who demanded something in return, not coin or compas, but
a private attraction of memory, of hunger, of some small
but essential part of myself. I felt the margin between
tchoyes some manipulation, thin to the faintness of tissue. It
was easier to mistake compulsion for direction when one had
nowhere else to go. Pass began to vanish behind me
with greater speed. The hollow was impatient, and that impatience
had the breath like hunger. The inked rolls on the
skull re arranged into words that accused me of remembering wrong,
of omitting dede details that had been essential to keeping safe.
A sentence that had once comforted me never reared like
an indictment, its curse of turn jagged. I became physically
aware of the forest as an organism that inhaled my
decisions and exhaled consequences. Roots swelled and softened beneath my boots,
and at the edge of a fork, the ground itself
seemed to breathe little heaves and sighs in the dirt,
as if something slept just under the surface and were
when fared with choice. The compass in my hand spun
for a breath, as if to see from the forest's
internal logic the list of rules that had once stadered
me now functioned like a rubicon. Cross it, and nothing
would be the same. The bell chimed again, lower, this
time a sound like metal swallowed by throat. I could
not tell if it was the guide's small charm or
something the trees had mimicked. Desperation pushed at the seam
of reason, and I did something I had been taught
not to do. A row carved into an old plankt
the path forecreed simply in blunt letters, do not cross
the breathing roots. I read that rule, felt my heart
latch on if for poachers, and then deliberately stepped off
the narrow rud into the living tangle. My boots found
softest and resistance. Both roots ti and and caressed, like
hands that had to fold a body. They drew my
foot forward as I closing a culff, the ground close
behind me, and with the sucking finished a motion it
had been waiting to make for a long time. I
heard the sound as a soft, wet snapping, as if
the forest had swallowed a secret. The forest downsowed my
transgression by offering proof. A tree disgorged a guide's scoff,
as if spitting out a relic. The scarf was pinned
to bark, like something the tree had worn to a funeral,
frayed and clinging to sap that had dried dark as
old blood. When I reached for it, the wood track
back and presented the cloth with the cautiousness of a
thing that nose guilt has a right to be asked for.
My fingers found the hem in a map fragment, hid there,
woven into the thread like a secret note, tucked in
the side cloth, the piece point of further inward, its
arrow stained by time. In some dark sap. The guide's
trail was real, but it had been curated, pruned, excised,
and shaped by the hollow, as if it only kept
the pieces that suited its accounting. Clutching the scarf, I understood,
with this low clarity of some one who has learned
the price of things, that rescue was a series of transactions.
The forest demanded pieces of me in exchange. For each
step closer, memory could be bottered, names surrendered, small habits
traded away like coins. At the moment of taking, I
felt something on wine inside my chest, a small scene
loostening and drifting into root things. It was not vilent
so much as inevitable, a loss that felt like the
slipping of a gloff. The comps felt lighter. The scrolls instructions,
once comfortable in their contract, now suggested that the guide
had always known this, and had therefore left a map
that was perhaps complicit, not simply a path, but a
pedal in the hollow's economy. Had the guide left me
directions or a ledger of sacrifices? Late toward Pratto on
the airth thinned and called blue mists began to gather
in the hollows between roots, settling like breath that had
been held too long. The torn fragment tied into the scarf,
offered a new angle, an arrow that pointed to a
narrow track disappearing into low cloud. The price attached to
that arrow was not listed on any side of vellumustitch
into any hem, But I understood, because I had been
alive long enough to learn the shape of debt. The
names carved in bark were not only those of the lost.
They were ledger entries of what had been traded away.
A name could mean a memory once bosses and the
notch beside it might stand full after you could no
longer summon. I walked with the compass held like a talisman,
and the scarf nodded to my satchel small tokens against
the malleable cruelty of the place. My steps became softer
than the forests. As I trained myself did not disturb
any more threads than necessary. In the periphery of the world,
I thought I heard my own name threaded through the leaves,
warped and almost accurate. A hollow was learning which syllables
belonged to me and which did not, A catalog the
margin between pronouncing and losing a nane. By the time
the first thin light leap through the canopy, I had
replaced some small parts of myself with forced currency. A
line of the scroll had dissolved into a new phrase
that made my left hand ache, as if from missing muscle.
The ink had shifted in a way that left a
hollowness where some gesture used to be something private, felt
as if it had been taken from a pocket and
left elsewhere, a memory, the way my mother used to
fold her hands when she read The Taste of an
Apricot in summer, now a commodity, tacitly priced and held
by the trees. I kept walking because the guide sent
threaded through moss and ember smoke, like a breadcrumb I
could still find. To leave the trailind I had learned,
would be to admit that guilt was heavier than curiosity.
I could not do that. The path receded into cold
bloom mist, and the forest whispered a name that was
almost mine, and knockwaite. I answered by stepping forward, the
compass pointing to a place that required pieces I did
not yet know how to pay. I walked on, carrying
the frayed hem and a map that refused to be whole.
Each fragment offered a direction and a subtraction. The scrolls
ink warmed under my thumb and shifted to say things
I could not yet understand. Sometimes a phrase would bloom
into meaning. Eye was later as though comprehension were delayed
and kept as a punishment. There is a clarity to kill.
Like a blade, it removes hesitation and leaves only one
set of possible actions. The hollow folded the world into
itself and then moved inside the crease, their travel becoming
a Ledger line in an old book. The trees kept
their accounts a notchier where a person had gone, a
scar across a trunk, where a promise had veil, a
little spiral for the name of a child who had
stopped answering. I did not know if the guide waited
in a deeper hollow, or if the forest had already
made the guide a part of its acounting. But I
had crossed the boundary that rescue demanded, and there was
no comfortable return. The names in the bar kept shifting,
as if to remind me that every Ledger entry had
once been a person. I kept my thumb on the
scroll and walked toward the murmur that might still be
the guide's voice, or might be the hollow testing me
for the next price. It would extract the forest taught
me a new kind of listening, not that which waits
for sand to form into words, but the kind that
looks for the slight change in a lease angle or
the pattern of a root swell. The guide scarf at
my hip fluttered against my thigh with a sound like
quite bleeding. I tucked the map fragment back into the
hem as if tucking a child into bed, and for
a moment I pretended that this was the sort of
rescue where you could find some one and hand them
back their life hole. But the hollow had taught me otherwise.
What you recovered here came edged in absence, a thing
you could hold with a missing corner. The bell on
the compass could still ring. It could be polish and
pealed until it snotes straded back into the world, and
yet the ringing would not stit shut what had been taken.
Rescue here meant entering into a long account and pain
with parts of yourself you did not know you owned.
At last, the path opened into a small clearing with
a mistpult like a sleeping animal treest back in a
low circle, as if to give privacy, and the ground
was littered with leaves that had lost their insistence of green.
There was the faint, mistakable trace of the guide as
a human absence. Dash of a small fire long since drowned,
a ring of flat stones, the print of a foot
half swallowed by moss. Nothing dramatic, only the quiet business
of some one who had lived here and kept on moving.
I let my hand rest in the scroll and in
the bell on my compass, and listen for the movement
that might mean arrival. The hollow waited, with its ledger open.
I did not know whether the Guide would step from shadow,
or if the forest would reveal only a final entry
and aim carved and crossed out, the scarf, pinned, and
then taken away. What I knew was simpler and bleaker.
I had paid an increments, and so had the world,
and now I walked the sum of those pigments like
a debt. The trees leaned in like witnesses in the
mist a round. The roller arrived on the scroll as
if it had always been there, and I had only
been forgetting how to read it. I had unrolled the
parchment at the forest narrow threshold, because habit had a
way of outlining courage into something tangible. Habit like a
rook coiled in the hand gives you the illusion of steadiness,
even when the ground under foot is unsteady. My thumb
traced the worn edge, and the letters lay otherworldly on
the page, ink dry but still warm to the damp
of twilight. The sentence sat at the top of the
page in the same careful hand it had written the
rest a blunt, miraculous imperfection. Whatever you do, don't look
at the mirror. The words were remembered Bruce, both instruction
and dere and they set the hollows rhythm against my
pulster way. An old tin can make you stumble on
a new road. The forest breed around me with the
slow annohlation of trunks and root, a swell of living
wood that seemed to count the seconds by the creak
of bark. Twilight pulled the color out of things, until
the world resembled a photograph left in the rain, Softened
at the edges, the bright parts gone to a silver grain.
The air smelled like wet loam and old leaves, like
a room where a thousand small decisions had already been made.
At the threshold, I could feel the difference between the
way I had been outside a person carrying a ledger
of gild in their pockets, and the way the hollow
expected you to come in and adorned, ready to be
written upon. I had come to retrieve a guide, a
person whose voice had been a map folded into kindness.
The guide's directions had always been given as if by
someone who did not think the world owed them an explanation,
and I trusted that particular economy of speech. They had
come to town and helped others. They offered a belfasten
to their sleeve as a promise, a small sound that
marked a safe step per punctuation for uncertain roots. But
the belt had been missing from the map stitch to
their sleeve, and the last ledger I had checked, the
loop was torn, as though removed by hands they did
not trust the sound. That detail became a knot in
my chest that I could not ignore. Guilt had grown
heavier than fear. There were debts that do not stay
in town squares, but follow you out into the bones
of the world. When obligations become physical weights, it stopt
to measure progress not by distance traveled, but by how
much of that WEIGHTY still carry? My fingers close round
the rolled scroll and the forest answered with a whisper
that sounded like a name. I almost recognized. There is
always a ledger in places that feed on wanderers, I thought,
and names are its currency. The hollow kept accounts and
notch Here for a mistep, a hush, there for a bargain,
and names for the balance. I had been careful enough
in the past to avoid the worst of its ledgers,
but that care had become a kind of cowardice, conservation
of self at the cost of others. It was the
sort of moral arithmetic air, once practiced long enough, begins
to calculate excuses out of loyalty. The path narrowed until
the trunks leaned in like a conspiratorial audience. Branches braided
overhead until the sky was a sliver of ash and
a cold blue film of the walls. Light sharpened every
edge into a blade of shadow. Brute breeded the ground
into calms that caught my boots and may progress in negotiation.
I learned the language of my steps again, the soft curse,
the step back, the small correction that kept you from
breaking your ankle or your resolve. The first new line
had appeared across the last blank portion of the rules
growl think that had been absent when I left the
outer lane. Finally bleeding letters into the fiber, I asked
a question I did not want to answer, and contradicted
the first rule and tone. If not in intent, the
forest is clever in how it lays choices like traps,
contradictions become commands when someone or something nosey prefer order.
At the fork beneath low branches, I paused parchment clutched
close to my chest as though it were a talisman
and not a map of Minefield's two directives stayed back
at me, both inked in the same hand and neither
willing to yield. One line is as did that tryst
the voice beneath the back. The other forbade following sounds
that were not your own heart beat. The contradiction was
not accidental. It was the hollow's way of learning which
faith you would choose. I had already been lying to
myself about my memory, folding recollections until they fit the
shape of guld I could carry. Shows felt like permission
for the forest to rearrange itself. And I knew then
that a decision is less about direction and more about
which portion of your past you are willing to leave behind.
I closed my eyes and listened. The woods answered by
breeding names, alos whose oration, throuding through the leaves, syllables
like soft stone sliding into water. The mirror lay half
swallowed at the lip of a still pool, showers of
glass like curled leaves around its surface, so black it
drank the last light. The crack face reflected me with
a hundred small deceptions. It showed a blink that arrived
before my own, a delay that tightened my chest into
a fist. In the water, the guide shadow turned and
pointed toward a trail carved up between roots, where the
moss had been rubbed thin by passing feet. It was
an invitation written in gestures. I did not speak, I
only watched, for even my silence had become a witness
to two orders of logic at once, one inside the
bark and one in the water's false truth. The mirror
made a promise I could see and not trust. The
guide's gesture was both invitation and indictment. When an object
looks at you as if it remembers you, you feel
ridiculous for the vulnerability and afraid because the world seems
to know things you do not. Trees and zip, the
bark in places and in slid out like curls of smoke.
Each trunk exposed a mouth of old letters, the names
of lost travelers, whispering their own astonishment at being found again.
The forest knew the guide's name and spoke it, as
if surprised to find it still in its possession. The
sound was not spoken aloud, so much as felt in
the collar of my coat, a vibration that set each
air to attentive posture. The guide's voice, when it came,
was a half sigh threaded through leaves. They filled the
ring of trunks and riddled comfort, not a greeting, but
a ledger being tollered. The hollow had become less a
landscape and more tribunal, where memory testified against tension. There
was an accused tory softness to it, like being reminded
of something you said and angry years ago. One trail
It chose collapse behind me, like a book, sliding shut roots,
rides and folded, knitting over at the chosen lane, until
retreat became an idea without legs. The path I had
not taken remained open, smuggering indifferent, as though the hollow
had decided I needed no option to reconsider Feara likes
to dress itself as consequence, and the forest obliged by
cutting off my exit. There was no panic in the
shape of my steps, only the brittle courage of someone
who had already paid for mistakes in smaller ways and
could not be at the calculus of paying again. That
is the odd choir. A person who was paid for
things with weight knows how to walk under that weight,
but it changes the way they breathe. You do not gasp,
you economize. Breaking the rule was not a violent rupture
so much as a slow, inevitable folding. The strictest command
on the scroll forbade entry through reflected surfaces. Yet my
fingers moved before my reason could invent the scaffolding of restraint.
Cold water licked my knuckles as I reached into the
mere pool and found the surface to be askin. When
it parted, it did not feel like glass, but like
a membrane that remembered every light that had touched it.
There was the faintest resistance, as if a door sied
rather than slammed. I stepped through the reflecttion because sometimes
The only way to find a person is to go
where they have become less themselves and more an echo.
The crossing was a soundless thing, moss and water rearranged
around my souls, and the world inverted into a whole
way of roots and reflected stars. This insation was not
like walking into another place, so much as walking into
another grammar. The rules were the same words arranged into
different sentences. On the far side, the guide was there
and not the same. They were caught between bark and breath,
with a map piece secreted in their hand like an omen.
The skin held the faint press of lichen, and the
eyes were both green gold, and dulled by a hardness
that came from burying secrets. Rescue has a shape that
seldom fits into the neatness the rescuer imagines. The guy's
presence was a ledger entry that costs more than a
return voice. There was an immediacy to their change, as
if the forest had seen something into them in the
time I had been choosing trails. You do not always
pull someone from a trap without them carrying the trap
back into your chest. We moved, or rather I moved,
and the guide followed with the slow accountability of some
unrelearning which steps belonged to them. The map piece they
clutched fit into the torn sileah of their old map,
and the brass compass on the hip trembled with a
tiny bell. So faint I thought perhaps I had imagined it.
Their mannerisms were the same, in outline tracing bark, with
finger tips, tilting the head when the trunk spoke, the
slight counting of stets, like a person keeping time with
the sawrow. Yet there was a new quiet in them,
a ledger in the posture. The forest watched our crossing
with a patient hunger, and the trees pressed names along
the route like talim marks. Each name felt like a
small ownership written into the air around my form. I
could feel the weight to hollow catalog, the tho of
an old debt here, a furthered edition there, and the
inevitable accumulation that makes returning to the ordinary world feel
like coming home to a house you no longer own.
Along the edge of a mossy clearing, I noticed the
skin on my forearm rising to letters, pale and wet,
as if the forest did innk me with a pen
made of roots. At first, I thought it was a
prick of a nettle, a familiar, manageable sting. Then the
stinging turned articulate, and the letters drew themselves, names small
and insistently tender. The tactile surprise was a cold wave
that spread through my arm until it became a column
of comprehension. Names carved on skin are not merely labels,
their signatures that they are like stitches through flesh and memory,
a recho that refuses to be raised. It struck me
then that rescued a price, and the price was not
always currency you could bargain away. I had gone to
retrieve a guide and found instead of bargain with causes
written in living flesh, ink called into a faint rich
and I realized the list on my scroll had been
written in a hand that now included me. Night then
toward pale pre dawn in the world felt like a
photographic coglected on a window, sill edges curling, and colors blanched.
Our steps became foot of conversations with rude and shadow.
Each movement a question asked, where answers were rationed. There
was an intimacy to moving through a place that had
re engineered its own manners to mislead you, a sculling
in humility, in the petty, patient cruelty of having to
be small to be safe. The Guide and I did
not need to exchange words. Our motions stitched a language
of practicality. Instead, we retrace steps that sometimes were not there,
in skirted polls that looked like memory, but were arranged
to betray the mind. The hollow yields to persistence more
often than it yields to force, And for all the
hollows cunning the thing, it ultimately respects a simple determination
somewhere an inch between rescue and returned. The forest offered
a compromise. It would allow an exit, but only if
we accepted a rule that had not been on the
original scroll, a cause it felt like a stitch meant
to close a wound, and instead left scar. The guide
pressed the map piece into my palm, not for ceremony,
but with the pell urgency of someone giving away more
than a map. Their hands were rough from carving paths
into bark, and from holding too many small shared fears.
They did not speak. The fingers left warmth and a
single bell note that sounded like a punctuation mark in
the dim. I understood then that the pipe of the
guide had kept was imperfect, and that my rival had
been part of the count being settled. Compromises and places
that count names are always asymmeric. Someone must bear the
ledger home. We moved toward the place where the world
unlaced itsself back into ordinary color, and the hollow answered
in the language in you best. It traded us a
way out and accost. The exit was not at all
so much as a condition. Leave with the name upon you,
and the forest will let you go. It was not malicious.
The Hollow's economy was not about cruelty, but about getting
what it needed to continue. Rescuing an inhabitant meant there
was a vacancy elsewhere, balance demanded filling the formality. There
was no malice in being counted. There was only inevitability.
Crossing back into the world where lanes remembers human handrails
felt less like relief and more like the settling of
dust after a party. The forest did not release us
with a sigh, but with the slow, ridiculous closing of
a book, brute smoothed the anger into sleepy curves, and
the ring of names knitted itself closed again. The mirepool
left to restue of fish scale light on my skin
and a new silence that hummed instead of spoke. I
felt the raised letters on my arm as a private weather,
a small proclamation that I had been counted. Each letter
was a cool, shallow cannon in flesh. I reminded that
some bargains are made with your body as witness. The
guide moved with a new sort of lightness, but theirs
was a kind of lightness that comes from being less
whole in exchange for a ket promise. There was an
economy to their movements now, as if they had spent
something essential and were pacing their recovery like one pace
as a wound. We walked back through the thinning mist
and the ordinary sounds of morning. A distant bird, the
scraping of a branch, and wind seemed extravagantly loud. After
a place that kept its own pulse. The bell in
the guy's pocket shied once with something that resembled relief,
a small human note that suggested the possibility of ordinary
gratitude rather than an accounting. By the time dawn pulled
itself into the canopy, a hollow receded into the ordinary
palett of mist and mud. The crack mirror I had
left leaning against a trunk sparkled faintly in a blue wash,
and I caught for breath the sense that the glass
had been smiling while no face stood before it. The
tendency of inanimate things to grim makes you distrust your
own judgment. You ask yourself if the landscape is performing
for you, or you are merely tired enough to imagine theater.
The names the trees had offered retreated into their bark
like sleep. The list on my scroll had been altered
with additional lines that began to hum. When I pressed
my thumb to them, I thing could sing. This new
writing would have been a lullaby of obligation. I was
not the same traveler who had walked in with a
clean audit of guilt. The forest had given me a
piece of the guide and taken a piece of something
I had not known I could lose. I kept my
hand on the scroll until the light grew honest and
the air warned enough to promise travel. There is a
superstition among people who pass through ledgers. You touch the
thing that recorded you, you remember the guide walked ahead,
not in hert but steadier, and the bell in their
pocket chimed once with something like relief. The mirror stay
where it had been, an abandoned thing, with the faintest
smile carved into its surface. I unrolled the parchment to
check the rules one last time. Ink that had not
been there before shimmered and settled like moss over the letters,
new clauses, curling into the margins like tendrils. Some rules
rewrite themselves when you cross their lines. Sometimes the world
update its terms in real time, and you are retroactively included.
I folded the scroll and stored it under the flap
of my satchel thumbwhere in the edge, as I always did.
It is foolish to think debts can be carried like coins.
They cling like burrs, in like names. They gather in
the seams of your clothing and the corners of your mind,
and you find them months later, lodged under the bed
of your attention. The hollow forest had not been a
place to conquer, but a ledger to be negotiated. Twilight
lays a thin blue blade across the roots, and there
carved into the heartwood, as if the forest itself had
taken upent to bone is a new instruction. The letters
are both sloppy, emphasise the work of a hand that
understood grain and ward at the same time. To hurry
my fingers have her over the gouge and then fall away.
The parchment in my satchel, wrapped twice, wound with a
ribbon that smells faintly of smoke and rain, feels suddenly
like an old, obsolete law. The carve command contradicts the
first line of the taunscroller carried to authority, speaking at once,
offering opposite directions. The forestix hills, and my name falls
back at me from the bark, spoken like a test.
There is a single cruel luxury the holl of forest
grants its wanderers. It shows choices as if they were
doors you could open and close. The cruelty is that
the doors never stay the same when you step through them.
Memory and I'll shift like light on water. I had
come here to find the guide, to bring her back,
to answer the guild that had been shrinking me for months.
I brought rules because people who want to survive things
like this clutch them the way children clutch their last
warm blanket. Rules feel like anchors. In this place, they
are tides at the root line. Approach the new carving
wheeze like a dare It contradicts the first director incdo
on my sleeve, and the woodwhorspers my name with something
that could be amusement. I press my thumb against the
gas ouch and feel down bries around the nail. The
sound that answers is not speech, but an echose beech,
a scraping sugar with leaves and bark in the low,
false rhythm of fur of clearing. My breath is small
and visible. A bead of moisture forms at my lip.
I make a quick inventory of what I know and
find it growing thain, compass, torn map, a bell I
once heard as a child, and now carry it like
a heavy coin. Each item feels less like an assurance
and more like a currency whose valley the forest might
change it a whim. There are signs of her everywhere
where the forest keeps making them. A tiny bell tied
to a twig, green gold eyes reflected in a smear
of moss. The faint, sweet, smellow sandal would buried under
rotten loam. I follow a narrowing corridor of roots into
a shaft of darker blue. The path of the throat
between learning trunks, where the guide's compass had han its
a low branch, and on it dangles a small brass
bell threaded with vast My hand clothes is in the
empty air where it used to be. I look at
the belt, look away, then look again. The reflection in
the moss hilts like a person leaning closer to see
me better. For a second, I think I see her,
a braid threaded with twine, a map, fluckers stitched or asleep,
the notch of a tooth that was not mine. Hope
leaks into me. A thin and dangerous light. Path narrows further,
and the trees begin to name people aloud. The words
are not crude echoes of living names, but intonations of absence,
syllables with edges names. The slide along the buck like
worms beneath skin. I try to move slower, and the
well speeds up around me. The parchment at my ribbed creeks.
The torm map stitch to my sleeve shudders like a thing.
With the memory, I remember counting steps once with the guide,
a childish gain to keep track of distance when no
horizon would otherwise form She had spoken, as if counting
something would steady the forest itself, as if keeping account
would make the woods behave The memory comes like a
patriarck warmth, a ring of small laughter, a bell chime.
The map folded into secrets that warm wrinkles under the
pressure of the present. The forest takes those edges, then
pronounces them differently. Moonlight pulls at the mirror pool, a
shallow hollow filled with shods and half broken glass. Little
mirrors blade like jears. The night presses its face close
this stars are prick through goals of leaves. My reflection
in the water is a ledge sure of rawness, a
face looking back as storm, creased with an impatience I
do not recognize in myself. Among the shads, a hand
appears to reach upon that might be the guides, fingers
long and fluent, mirroring me, yet not bound by the
laws of my flesh. Above the pool carved into the
basin's lip is another rule. The letters are older, the
buck around them bleach by time, and the commander's isolation.
Leave the water and touch do not answer reflections. The
two instructions sit like bracting jaws. One invites a rescue
the other forbid breach. There is an arithmetic to hesitation
here one step too, then the folding of distance into consequence.
The path behind me contracts as the guide had said
it might. The names in the barks well and pressed
together like a chorus, the walkway becomes a page, and
the page turns itself. In that turning, I feel the
option over three slip away, like a dream making on
the wrong side. There is no shame in measuring the
distance between yourself and the last safe place. There is
only the pain of recognition when that distance converts into
a decision. I take alarm slotted step toward the pool.
The air tastes like copper and old paper. The torn map,
stitched on my sleeve and now bleeding, thris into my palm,
flutters with a dried, accusing sound. The reflections hancaps the
water's surface and repeat my approach with that same eagerness.
I do not want mirrored back. The caval above the
pool speaks with the severity of a magistrate. My mind
runs through the options like currency. Abide and perhaps lose
the guide, break, can perhaps lose myself. The guy's bell
rings in a memory that may be a trick, soft
patient chimes that once meant steady footing. Now the bell
is a campbell. It is a token pull from a
slot with no guaranteed prize. What did you take? When
I touch a mere fragment with a pat of my finger,
the well does not wait to judge me. The moment
is not instantaneous. It stretches the way a bruise expands
and fills my chest with a heat and a cold
I cannot place. The glass is finer than any river pebble,
thinner than a child's candy, and it conducts more than light.
It conducts history. There is a flask. The guy's face,
certain and wrong at once, surges through me with a
clarity that is too sharp to be pure memory and
too mollible to be true. I see a smile, as
if she had known this was the only way I
see ELTs press against an impossible scene. The strike loose
is a scraping loss of something in me, A small
bright piece of how I used to count steps, a
private name for a place that has vanished because I
allowed the forest to collect at The payment is both
physical and not. I smell the magtic tang of burn
parchment The edges of my royal scroll singe and coal.
The compass my brass comfort spins like a wither vein
in its own storm, and settles pointing where direction is
not helpful. My fingers trich with the phantom memory of
a path that no longer exists. The world rearranges itself,
not with malice but indifferent logic. The guard's hand with
draws from the mirrored surface. Whether she is more present
or less is a question that culls in on its
own hinge. I gather fragments of my remembrance and find
holes in the stitching of who I am after the strike,
I am not whole. Something clip the thread inside me,
and I stagger the belt holes then not near, but
not far, and it holds possibility. The sound is small
and honest, and makes the hair along my forearm stand
up in a way that is not purely fear. My
breath is a ragged metronym. The parchment in my back
bears blackened edges were a tiny heat lickd it. The
ink is bled into runnels that make shapes. I cannot
pass the compassed angles from my neck. At a new angle,
I think of the guide's soft instructive voice, the way
she used to tilt her hate and count's stats out loud.
That voise is now a roomor lodged behind my teeth.
Before I leave the clearing, I find that I have
become a toll, and the forest assists have become texts.
I scratch into the shell of a root because the
woods demand a ledger, and I have only shamed to offer.
The rule I write is a confession, leaning on a
pretense of guidance, safety, foistered from fear. It is honest
in its own way, an admission that I acted impulsively,
that I traded something internal for a chance at rescue.
The wood acceptinc and blood in the trembling line. As
soon as I finish, the pats, rearrange trunks, rotators. If
pages have turned to reveal newscript, the forest answers with
renewed intent, as if pleased by my compliance or my weakness.
From somewhere down the line, a clearing calls my name again,
a syllable pull from the bark that is both her
name and a command. There is a protocol to how
I walk after that. Smaller steps, a careful tailt of
the head, the studying touch of myth among the toon
skulls edge. The carver rules do something more than instruct
They alter the geometry of the world. A line of
bark can become a pathway, and not shroke can rearrange
a horizon. When the guard's bell rings again, it sketches
the air in a different key, closer than father, wavering,
like a drill clearing for a different sentence. I find
traces of her where there should be none. A braid
caught on a branch, a footprint with the wrong tread
pressed into loam. Each trace is ambiguous, a smear insisting
on interpretation. Perhaps she is trapped and needs pulling. Perhaps
she is allure. Either possibility will bend me if I
let it. Memory comes and goes, like tired I clutch
particular things with the grasp of someone in water. The
scar on my right ebertingles, as if something behind it
wants to be known. The compass becomes a small mirror
of the world and refuses to answer. In simple Norse,
the parchments inclarges back some of its certainty, as if
an animal had fed on its edges overnight. I do
not know how much of me was spent When I
touch the glass, there are absences that remain. Clearing and
aim I used to write in The margins are face
glazed on a pot that I can no longer cull
by its right memory. Those holes ache differently from fear.
They are the hollow left after the forest takes what
it needs. Yet amid the und fretting something studies. The
bell sounds again, freding bramble with an almost human credence,
and I follow, because leaving is an act I can
picture but cannot accomplish. The hollow force begins to arrange
its roads toward an unseen clearing, drawing me unlike a
needle drawing thread. Each step of compliance is boder. I
do not know whether the forest or repay me with
the guide or with the lesson bound and pain. My
feet carry me, and my heart carry is the thin,
stubborn light of purpose. I must believe in that light,
because gil has wait. It angers a person to any
course that feels like penance. The forest tests the limits
of what I remember and what I choose to preserve.
Rules here are not immutable, They are instruments of transformation.
The carved admonition of twilight will be catalogged into the
ledger of my days and then revised. I have come
to understand that the hollow force does not only punish
my steps, it rewrites them. Touch a mere fragment, altered
more than the guard's possible fate. It struck at the
seams of my identity, reminding me that obligations made to
others can be turned into spells against one's self. The
guide had taught me that a map could be a promise.
The forest teaches that promises can be re arranged into
a geography of need. I put on begins to smoke
into the canopy. The path splus beneath shafts of blue
that look like old film projected into living wood. I
pause and lay my pom again against the parchment. The
ink rul's cull under my finger, like the edge of
a sleeping thing. I think of the guid's habit of
tracing bark with her finger tips, as if learning names
from the grain. She had kept a map stitch to
her sleeve and folded it with an economy that belonged
to people used to holding small trus course, the forest hums.
A name calls me from somewhere ahead. It is thin
and intimatum rings with a meaning I cannot yet bear.
I write one more rule into a root shell, something
practical disguised as a vow. I do it not because
I trust instruction, but because axophon are often the only
way to keep moving. The route accepts the mark in
the weld, rearranges itself as promised, like a living thing
obeying a mood. Pass rotate shadows length and oddly, and
for an instant I feel the forest leaning toward me
in an almost conspiratorial hush. I move on, drawn towards
the bell's uncertain ring and a clearing that may or
may not hold the guide waiting along the way, I
name the things I can no longer wristle losing. There
are small, stubborn memories a laugh she made, the cord
in the back of her throat, the way she tied
a knot at the end of a map, the exact,
honest compass of her voice when she taught me to
weigh choice and not a promise. I repeat them to
myself like prayers. The more I speak them, the less
their edges blur. But the forest listens and works to
fold those prayers into new shapes. Sometimes I wonder whether
the guide, if she were truly somewhere ahead, would tell
me to stop. Would she have uttered the car of rule?
Would she have pressed her lips to an impossible scene.
I cannot know. The only thing I can hold is
the direction my shame points me in the hollow forest
pulls at me by name once more, and I answer
with step. The rules will keep changing, so will I.
Somewhere ihead, something calls with the voice of some one
I once loved, or with the voice of the place
that buller make me. I cannot be servant, which I
can only keep walking and lets the echoes of what
I have done follow me into the blue, listening for
the bell that will tell me whether I have saved
her or sold myself. I kept the rules rolled inside
the satchel like a wounded animal. The parchment had been
creased until the fibers softened. The ink ad a habit
of sliding beneath my thumb when I read by low light,
as if it wanted to crawl back into the wood
that berthed it the first dust. I set myself beneath
the leaning ash. I nudged the scroll open and found
a sentence I could not remember writing. The letters had
shifted overnight, neat deliberate strokes, altered into a single line
that asked for something I could not name, but knew.
I have once owned a small memory, a private hinge
in the lock of my mind. The incas for that hinge.
Now it asked in the polite, insistent way of things
that have been fed the act of asking until it
tastes like hunger. There are rules to any place that
eats people in the hollow forest, the rules where bar
can take root. They are stitched into maps, whispered along
the veins of moss, and sometimes their way to tell
a human is hungry enough to read what they mean.
My list promised a rout and promised a price. It
had promised a guide. The guide's absence was the at
that sent me under the ashen, into the narrowing tracks
where trunks were carved with names like Comma, stuck into
the skin of the world. I had come to rescue
that warm, low de voice, and to return with answers.
Gilp pushed me like a blind hand. Heenance kept me
moving when my body baked for a bed that was
not woven of damp leaves at dust, the ash cast long,
blue shadows, a film brain, hush across groundlittered with brittle things.
I sat with a scroll across my knees and felt
the forest breed around the edges of the rules, as
if it were a single organism conducting a slow on,
never a symphony. There is a small private panic when
the thing you rely on begins to change on you.
The scroll's new line threaded itself like a bobed finger
into the logic of my efforts, and drew out a
memory I could not reach. My thumb found a different
fold in the parchment, where a blot had not been before,
black as a bruise. I tested it by trying to
recall a winter, my hands on a low stove, the
smell of cold iron in a small kitchen. The memory
fizzed like a dying ember. Then the edges blow, the
scroll watched, and the ash listened. I might have left then,
if leaving had not been complicated by something simple and human.
The map to you on the guid's ned and I
had matched the markings I had carried for months. That
match turned absence into a direction, and I could not
not follow. The path closed and opened like a lid.
Trunks loomed with cliffs, carved shallows a secret. When the
trees whispered, they did not speak in syllables alone, but
in the inush of Neima's air. The guy's name folded
into those whispers and arrived haltingly, like a footstep you
can hear twice because you remember where it should land.
With a voice. Came the memory of a laugh that
could warm the inside of all winter cloak. The forest
pressed that warmth into my ribs, and then thinned it
down to a wet, metallicill. Every carved name seemed to
watch me. Every step I took felt preordained by letters
I had not yet read. Where the trunks grew closer,
the air tasted of damp paper and risin. My compass
spun like a spinning coin. The first time the rules contradicted,
one command insisted I trust my memory. The next demand,
did I give it away? To proceed? The instruments I
clung to you. Brass compass wove parchments as satchel with
everything I thought I needed. Grown against the forest logic.
The path folded under my feet and reformed me, until
the way I had taken myself mboled something else. Entirely.
I memorized the new folds like a litany, and each
recitation felt like handing another private thing to the dark.
At a route hollow, under a bowl of moss, my
fingers found a bell, half buried insult. It was tiny
and brassen had the guide's bell charm, the bell that
used to tinkle on warm mornings, as if to cook's luck.
The bell had been silenced and then silence again by low.
I wiped the dot at the back of my hand,
and the metal sign a thin short note that blowed
into the whispering names beside a trunk board tattoo mark
like a map burned into its bark. The lines echoed
the guide's map tattoo. The forest had routed me toward
dyslocus with the clinical precision of a thing that catalogs
prey Knifefall made the world an accordion of blue light
and thin shadow. The azure shaft seemed to come from
nowhere and everywhere at once, cutting the air with something
like a spotlight, invented by the Old Golds to test
stage a craft. Flying dust turned to motes of memory.
When a stray wind moved the rules leaned harder, then
more contradictory, as if the forest were testing which part
of me would crack first. Obeying one commend would fold
the path in were obeying the next wooden spool is
in to a dozen stupid roots that only led to
more coved names. The compass gave up its purpose and
became a prop round and honest, but blind. There is
an old kind of fear that arrives not as a giroud,
but as an erosion. Each step eroded a certainty. The
rules asked me to trust an image to meet a
reflection in the still pole, and surrendered a name memory
that sat behind my eyes. That image promised a future
in which the guide walked from the water hole and speaking.
The image offered a simple, impossible bargain. The guide lives
if one memory dies. Stopping at the pole was like
stepping into an altar of glass. The water took the
night to azure and made a cracked mirror beneath the oak.
My reflection moved a second late, and the echo looked
at me with the softness I did not remember cultivating.
The mere pool did not bluff. It held a possible future.
Like a coin pressed upon. It offered me a scene
where the guide stepped away, warm as in my light,
holl enough to laugh the old laugh again. I felt
the outline of the memory the forest wanted, small, humbling,
threaded with the face of some one I had promised
to protect, and my chest re curl from the idea
of letting it go. The rules promised nothing about pain,
only Kenneck's memory in another out The bargain was precise
and brutal. I knelt uncut water and more strepeles take
my reflection and make futures I had not practiced living.
There was a crack in the surface, like the hairline
in the mirror I carried, and the reflection smiled in
a way that felt like theF When the guide revealed
themselves at the root heart, they were both the person
I had known and a thing patch with bark branches,
threaded underskin, and were he braided with twine, wants hung
thin roots, wove through silver white strands. The green gold
of their eyes held the attention of sunlight trapped in glass.
My compass was useless. At their feet. The carve map
along there net matched the trunk mat around us like
a roon that confirmed covenant. They did not say the
pact aloud. I did not need words to understand the
forest ledger. The pat was a contract eshed into the
living wood of this place. The hollow forest keeps one
thing and gives another. It asks for pennant or devotion,
and sometimes the two are indistinguishable. The guide moved like
someone who had counter footed too many times. Their mannerisms
were the same, finger tips tracing bark. I tld of
the head as if listening to syllables that were not there,
but their warmth had the shadow tinge of something that
had been harvested and replanted. The root hard itself was
a hollow altar, swollen root's form in a bowl of
rootwood and water that smelled faintly of ember smoke and
crushed wild herbs. They reached toward me with a hand
that was both invitation and ledger. The forest hummed around
our bones like an orchestra strong tide. Choices in the
hollow forest are not moral in the way people usually
think of morals. They are ledger entries and exchange of
unit for unit. I could trade a memory for the
guide's release. My mind cataloged several possibilities in the seconds
given to me. Trade a memory of a winter's table,
Trade the map of how to return, Trade the smell
of a mother's sleeve. Each possibility was ablade. Each option
was a thing that made shape of me and would
loosen if I allowed it to go to surrender. Memory
is to hand the forest a seed. It plants it
and lets the thing grow into new rules later. The
guide's face was a careful plea. The bell in my
palm was a small, rusted testament to the paths already traveled.
I imagined running instead, slipping like smoke from a trap before
seals Titan. I imagined the satche lenting its grost back
into the world. The rules had been watching, believing had
never been that simple. If I walked away to forest,
we'd mark my spy in with a new name and
watched to see if it could make me forget why
I had once come. That kind of slow devastation is
worse than a single amputation. The root heart pressed a
question into my ribs, and I felt how the world
would be different if I answered one way versus another.
There was a part of me that knew the exchange
would be irreversible, and another part that could not Towey,
the cost of guilt firs as the weight of a
life restored. When I set the bell at the center
of the root throne and slid the scroll across the
damp wood, the ink and the parchment began to bloom
as a fed by the soil itself. The new line,
ever wrote, was sterile and generous. It demanded the precise
memory the poll had shown me in exchange for the
guide to exit. The pack vibrated like a struck string.
My thumb brushed a rolled edge of the scroll and
felt the papery great of a choice about to be made.
There was no triumphant heroism, only a small whethered person
obanilis because the list had been all they had left
to hold by the forest took what I offered in
a way that felt at once tactile and impossible. A
press sure passed through my head in the well traded
color for texture. The memory I had carried, a small
pivot point in the chain that had sent me hunting,
slid loose like a seaman stitched standing in the rue heart. Afterward,
I could remember the shape of the bargain, but the
memory that had been surrendered had a new property absence,
a blankness well laughter had lived. When I tried to
conjure the winter's iron stove, I found instead a tidy
hole where sound used to be The guide exhaled, and
the roots east, like fingers releasing a throat. They stepped away, changed,
shad up grateful gratitude in the notherness interlace like vines
around their limbs. They moved with the gate that had
learned how to bear forest within it. Something in this
smile no longer belonged entirely to the human world. When
I looked at them, I felt both rescue and theft
in the same line. The bell, newly rung in air
that had known only silence, vibrated a note that tasted
faintly of old smoke and sand the wood. It was
a small, trembling proof of the bargain's success. I walked
back toward the thinning trees and into dawn that pulled
blue like a bruise along the horizon. The forest receded
in the way of places that had finished a transaction.
They become polite and distant. I had a new hollowners pressed.
Where a memory used to be worth in costs existed
now on opposite side of me, like two cold hands.
The guide walked beside me, altered their maped had two
still visible, like a scar of necessity. They stepped with me,
but did not step into my memory. They had been returned,
but not restored to the shape they had held before.
At the forest edge, where the mismet the trail and
the ashes shadowed into ordinary branch, my fingers found the
scroll again. Fresh ink had crawled across the margin. Need
as a ledger. The new rule referenced the memory I
had surrendered by name, and wrote it down, like a
commodity to forest kept for its own designs. It hinted
that the exchange was not a forgiveness, but a boring.
The forest would catalog what it took and call its
ledger complete only when it pleased. The line left me
with a sensation I could not reduce to words, acquiet,
as if realization that any victory here was temporary. I
had saved the guide. I had traded a piece of
myself for that rescue. The guides laugh lingered like emberheat.
But when I closed my eyes, the hole where the
traded memory had been throwned with new absence. I could
not remember why I had come beyond guilt and the
need for penance. The beginning of a chain had dissolved
like a footstep and falk. I walked home with a
brass bell that sang softly and the scroll that promised
only more rules. The forest had fed the script, and
the parchment was part of appetite. Morning came thin and blue,
and an empty place inside me seemed to care the
hollow forest so an appetite. I thought of the carved
names that watched my leaving, and of the new rule
linked in the fresh dawn. Penance had a taste, and
it was not sweet. The guide had been rescued, but
the price carried after taste. I held the bell up
and listened to a small note. It was a sound
made of survival and subtraction, in the quiet trade of
someone who had learned how much of themselves they be
willing to send away. This wasn't the end. As the
trees fell behind me, they left a shadow, like a promise.
The scroll lay in my satchel and breathed anew ink,
like a living thing that had grown fond of hunger.
When I finally let myself rest, my fingers still rubbed
at the edge of the roll parchment, as if theac
could conjure the memory back, it did not. In its place,
the forest had left a rule that spoke to me
in the morning light, and to anyone who would follow.
The hollow forest echoes each exchange. It keeps ledges of
what is given and what is taken, and uses them
as soil for future bargains. I had bought a reprieve
and planted another route of its own design. At the
age of sleep, I heard the faintest movement of leaves
and thought I heard a renant of the guy's bell
far off, as if the forest were ringing. A ledger closed.
My hand found the satchel strap. In my mind, Matt,
now by absence, traced the next possible path. The echo
of the forest was not a sound that let you go.
It was a Habit followed the echoes for the next episode,
and you will learn where the rules bear next. The
echoes never really stop.