Scene 1: “Todd’s Tattoo Howls in Morse Code”
I woke up glowing again. Which, by now, is less of a surprise and more of a low-level, panic-flavored background noise.
My arm was pulsing like a rave glow stick on a mission. I stared down at my tattoo—formerly a mysterious, occasionally-sentient birthmark, now apparently a supernatural messaging app—and tried to decide if I was more annoyed or alarmed.
Spoiler: It was both. With a dash of “someone please give me decaf and a priest.”
Across the cabin, Zara was curled up in a nest of witchy blankets, one slipper off, one charm bracelet still glowing faintly from whatever spell she’d cast before bed. She cracked one eye open, took one look at me, and mumbled, “That’s definitely ghost Morse.”
“I was afraid of that,” I said. I wasn’t. I had no idea what ghost Morse was, but it sounded like something I should’ve failed in school. “Does it come with captions?”
She closed her eyes again. “Only if you bleed on it. Don’t.”
The pulse in my arm sped up, then slowed, then began a deliberate rhythm. Tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap.
Doug—the ghost dog, unofficial team mascot, paranormal barometer, and maybe the only being who liked me unconditionally—drifted through the floor like a translucent marshmallow and immediately began circling. Fast.
Then faster.
Then barking directly at the window like he was auditioning for Pet Sematary 3: The Barkening.
“I think he senses a vibe,” I said.
“Doug is a vibe,” Zara muttered. “Tell him to vibe quieter.”
My tattoo’s pulse crescendoed into a rhythm I vaguely recognized.
Wait.
Was that… repeating?
I stared harder. Blinked. Then leaned over the side of the bunk and grabbed the mostly-stale granola bar I’d been using as a bookmark for my copy of Spells for Idiots With No Upper Body Strength.
Using the edge of the wrapper, I scribbled it out:
- ? ? — ? ? — — ? — ? — —
“Zara,” I said, voice higher than normal, “what’s the Morse code for ‘bad’?”
She groaned. “Let me guess. It says ‘help me,’ or ‘run,’ or ‘get thee to a nunnery?’”
I held it up. “It says echo echo echo echo echo. Over and over.”
She sat up immediately.
Doug stopped spinning. Slowly floated to the door. Then barked three times and disappeared through the wall like a spectral Roomba on a mission.
Outside, the trees began to sway.
Not rustle.
Sway.
Rhythmically. Like they were syncing to a beat only the haunted could hear.
Jessie slammed the cabin door open in nothing but flannel pajama pants and a sleep mask pushed onto his forehead like a tiara. “Who messed with the ley lines? My chest hair is tingling.”
Zara pointed at me. “His tattoo is communicating with dead things again.”
“Hey,” I said, “technically, you’re also a dead-thing communicator. And your closet whispers at night.”
“Those are meditative affirmations,” she snapped. “Not the same.”
Rachel appeared in the doorway wearing full tactical black and holding a cursed dagger that still had a return to sender sticker on it.
She took one look at me glowing, the forest doing its possessed tree ballet, and Doug’s translucent trail drifting toward the woods.
Then she said:
“Grab your shoes. The trees are screaming.”
And just like that, another peaceful morning at Camp Dreadmoor began.
Scene 2: “Doug Draws a Map With His Ghost Slobber”
Here’s the thing about following a ghost dog through an eldritch forest before sunrise: It’s somehow both too quiet and way too loud.
Doug drifted ahead of us in full spectral overachiever mode, occasionally phasing through low branches like a dog-shaped fog machine. His tail wagged, if wagging could somehow express urgent foreboding.
We followed—me, Jessie (still shirtless, because of course), Zara (sipping something bubbling from a skull-shaped thermos), and Rachel, who was already sharpening a knife against another knife. For mood.
Doug stopped abruptly in the center of a clearing that looked like nature’s attempt at a crime scene. The trees circled around in an almost-perfect oval. Too symmetrical. Too curated.
“Why do I feel like I’m about to get ambushed by a haunted Whole Foods?” I asked.
Doug barked once. Loud. Echoing.
Then he reared back his ghostly snout, drooled a thick stream of shimmering ectoplasm, and began drawing.
“What the hell,” Jessie whispered. “Is he—”
“—making a map out of his spiritual saliva?” I finished, eyes wide.
He was.
The glowing goo snaked across the forest floor, coalescing into lines and curves, forming pathways and boundaries we hadn’t seen before. A full, three-dimensional topographical rendering of Camp Dreadmoor and its surrounding horrors.
“Oh,” Zara said flatly. “That’s a ley network. That’s bad.”
“Define bad,” I said, already edging backward.
“Bad as in, we’re standing on a node where magical trauma likes to party,” she replied. Then added, “And the bar has a cover charge made of blood.”
Doug finished his drawing with a dramatic flourish of his tail, slapping a big glowing X right at the center of the woods.
I looked at the X.
Then at Doug.
“Let me guess. That’s where the screaming trees live.”
Doug barked three times. Then floated straight up into the air and wrote—IN FREAKING SMOKE:
“YOU SHOULD RUN NOW.”
I blinked. “Oh, good. He’s upgraded to fonts.”
Rachel crouched beside the ectoplasm map and narrowed her eyes. “This clearing wasn’t on any of the camp blueprints.”
“Wait—there are camp blueprints?” I asked.
She ignored me and tapped the center of the X. “Something’s nesting. Deep magic. And it’s not happy we’re poking around.”
Jessie sniffed the air. “I smell… rosemary. And betrayal.”
Zara nodded sagely. “Classic possessed forest scent profile.”
Doug landed silently. His ears twitched. He barked once, then turned and trotted along one of the glowing pathways—toward the trees that had been whispering our names since Tuesday.
“Cool cool cool,” I muttered. “Let’s just follow the haunted dog through a cursed ley loop. That’s a completely normal sentence.”
No one laughed.
Because in Camp Dreadmoor?
That was a normal sentence.
The map flickered once, then disintegrated into sparkling mist that settled in our hair and probably into our lungs. So, that’s nice.
Zara coughed. “Just a heads-up—breathing in ectoplasmic residue may result in mild hallucinations, emotional turbulence, or spontaneous prophecy.”
“Or death?” I asked.
She shrugged. “That’s more of a Tuesday thing.”
We stared at the path Doug had taken. Into the trees. Into the unknown.
“Okay,” I said. “On a scale from one to full supernatural breakdown, how bad is this gonna be?”
Rachel strapped another blade to her thigh. “We’re already past breakdown. This is forest-based psychological warfare.”
Jessie cracked his knuckles. “Let’s go fight some pinecones.”
I didn’t want to go.
I really didn’t.
But the trees were already parting for Doug.
And I was pretty sure the ectoplasm in my shoes spelled out “CHOSEN OR ELSE.”
So we followed.
Because when a ghost dog draws you a drool map, you don’t question it.
You pack snacks, cast a ward, and walk into the woods like the disaster squad you are.
Scene 3: “The Trees Don’t Like Zara’s Lip Gloss”
We hadn’t even made it twenty feet into the woods before nature got petty.
“I swear,” Zara said, pushing aside a low-hanging branch that immediately recoiled like she’d insulted its mother, “I’m not even wearing aura-masking gloss.”
The trees didn’t care. They bent away from her like synchronized judgmental grandmothers. Every step she took, another branch twisted back like it was gasping at her outfit.
Jessie offered, “Maybe it’s your energy?”
Rachel, sword drawn and entirely done with everything, muttered, “Maybe it’s the fact she smells like protection spells and millennial anxiety.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” Zara said, crossing her arms as a fern curled into a middle finger. Literally.
We moved as a group now—slow, steady, and increasingly aware that the forest did not want us here. The air had a weird charge to it, like the static before a lightning strike or the moment your mother says “we need to talk.”
And then a root grabbed my ankle.
No warning. Just one minute I was walking and the next, my foot was being caressed by a vine that whispered, “Wrong timeline.”
I screamed. Not a full scream—more like a startled honk of betrayal. The kind of noise you make when your ex texts “we should talk” and your ankle starts glowing.
“Uhhhhh,” I managed, pointing at my foot.
Rachel stomped over and sliced the root with a casual flick of her blade. It hissed like an angry teakettle and retreated into the dirt.
Jessie poked the spot with a stick. “Definitely cursed.”
“You think everything is cursed,” I said, hopping on one foot. “You said that about the vending machine.”
“It ate my change and growled,” he snapped.
“Maybe it just had indigestion.”
“I know indigestion growls. That was demonic.”
Zara reached down and gently rubbed some warding balm over my sock. It smelled like lavender and holy regret.
“Thanks,” I said. “Why are the trees so mad?”
“They’re not mad,” she replied calmly. “They’re disappointed.”
Rachel cut through another vine. “Disappointed in what?”
“In us,” Zara said. “In the camp. In the past. Take your pick. The land’s memory is full and petty.”
Just then, a branch reached out—not aggressively, but almost… inquisitively. It brushed the edge of Jessie’s shoulder like it was testing him.
He grinned. “I think this one likes me.”
The branch slapped him.
Hard.
He stumbled back, hand on his cheek. “Okay. Message received.”
Doug barked once and trotted ahead through the thickening brush. Every time he moved, the trees parted slightly, like they weren’t sure whether to obey or flee.
We followed, hesitantly. Cautiously. Annoyed.
That’s when the chanting started.
Not from us. Not from any visible source. But from the trees themselves. Deep, whispery, layered voices, some ancient, some childlike, some that sounded eerily like my third-grade math teacher, all murmuring the same phrase:
“Return what you took. Return what you took.”
Jessie froze. “Did the forest just… guilt-trip us?”
Zara frowned. “It’s an echo chant. Something was taken from this place, and it remembers.”
Rachel crouched low, scanning the path ahead. “Something… or someone.”
I tried not to hyperventilate. “Can it maybe forget? Like, forgive and forget?”
The forest responded by dropping a pinecone squarely on my head.
Doug stopped at a thick knot of trees, their trunks twisted like they’d grown while screaming. A stone sat nestled among the roots—circular, engraved with overlapping runes that shimmered faintly in red.
Zara stepped forward.
All the trees immediately leaned away from her.
She rolled her eyes. “Okay, fine. I’ll sit this one out. The land clearly thinks I’m the villain in a forest-themed YA novel.”
Jessie tried stepping closer. The trees trembled but didn’t react.
Rachel moved next. One of the trees groaned but didn’t lunge.
I followed.
Bad idea.
A vine shot up, tried to wrap my waist, and whisper-hissed, “Unclaimed potential must not pass.”
I backpedaled into Rachel. She grunted but didn’t stab me, which I took as a good sign.
“Okay,” I panted, “the plants hate me.”
Rachel touched the stone. It pulsed once, faint and tired.
“We’re getting closer,” she said.
“To what?” I asked.
She looked back at me, eyes shadowed, jaw tight. “To the thing Echo left behind. Or maybe the thing that took her.”
Doug howled softly.
The whispering stopped.
Which, somehow, was worse than the chanting.
We all stared into the dark ahead of us—where the trees grew too dense for light and the air buzzed with old magic and bad intentions.
“Cool,” I said weakly. “So the forest’s mad, the trees are mean, and I’m apparently a walking unpaid bill.”
Rachel turned to me. “Exactly.”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“Neat. I’ll just lie down and let the moss file a complaint.”
But we kept going.
Because Doug kept going.
Because we had seven days before Echo walked again.
And honestly?
She sounded like someone who was really done waiting.
Scene 4: “Rachel Bleeds Again (This Time It’s Polite)”
By the time we stumbled into the clearing, I had dirt in places no one should have dirt, Doug had stopped glowing (never a good sign), and Jessie had taken off his shirt again. For no reason. Just vibes.
“This is it,” Rachel said, standing at the edge of a circle of trees that looked less like flora and more like frozen screams.
They were twisted. Bent. Charred at the roots like they’d survived fire but lost their faith in sunlight. Five in total. Each one knotted and gnarled like it had aged too fast and held a grudge about it.
In the center: a low stone altar, carved from a single block of obsidian, etched with runes I couldn’t read but felt in my teeth.
Zara stepped forward, carefully. “These trees weren’t grown. They were shaped.”
“By what?” I asked, already regretting it.
She didn’t answer. Instead, she knelt next to the stone and waved her hand over it. Her fingertips sparked with faint blue light.
“It’s humming,” she said. “Softly. Like an old spell waiting to be remembered.”
Rachel didn’t say a word. She just walked forward—slow, calm, like she knew what was coming.
“Uh, Rachel?” I said. “Now seems like a good time to remember you have blood and a historically bad relationship with ancient objects.”
She reached the altar. The trees all groaned. Like they recognized her. Or maybe like they pitied her.
Then, without warning, her nose started bleeding.
Not from impact. Not from stress. Just… spontaneously. One slow, crimson drip sliding down to her upper lip. She wiped it with the back of her hand and looked utterly unbothered.
“Cool,” she muttered. “It’s starting early this time.”
She walked to the nearest tree and, with the kind of tired confidence only Rachel could weaponize, pressed her bloody thumb to the bark.
The tree sighed.
And then it whispered—audibly, unmistakably: “Welcome back.”
I might’ve peed a little. Emotionally.
“What did it just say?” Jessie asked, backing up slightly.
“It said ‘welcome back,’” Zara confirmed, eyes wide.
“I was really hoping I hallucinated that,” I whispered.
But Rachel was still at the tree, her palm flat now, blood smearing into the grain. The tree pulsed faintly. And then—just for a second—the clearing changed.
I don’t mean like the lighting shifted or someone turned on a fog machine.
I mean, time bent.
Suddenly, it wasn’t us in the clearing.
It was someone else.
A girl. Our age, maybe younger. Standing exactly where Rachel stood. Her hair wild, her eyes too wide, her hands trembling as she clutched a scroll to her chest like it might bite her—or she might bite it first.
She was sobbing. Ugly, loud, full-body sobs that cracked through the air like thunder wrapped in grief. Behind her, the altar glowed a sickly violet. The trees leaned in, watching. Waiting.
“Echo,” Rachel whispered.
The image flickered. The girl—Echo—screamed something soundless, and then the vision vanished.
We were back.
Same clearing. Same cursed trees. But different now.
Heavier.
The air buzzed with something old and bitter and deeply, deeply lonely.
Zara stepped up to Rachel’s side. “This place isn’t haunted,” she said. “It’s bound.”
“Bound to what?” I asked.
Doug let out one soft, almost human groan. Then said, very clearly, “You.”
I laughed. Not on purpose. It just… happened. A sharp, hysterical snort that sounded more like a dying goose than a teenage boy.
“Me? Why is it always me?”
“Because,” Zara said softly, “you have the mark.”
I looked down. My tattoo—the weird, pulsing swirl on my arm that sometimes glowed and sometimes hummed and sometimes decided to Morse Code out cryptic nonsense at 3 a.m.—was glowing again.
Not flashing. Not pulsing.
Glowing.
Steady. Bright. Like a lighthouse made of “you’re very screwed.”
Rachel wiped her bloody hand on her jeans. “It saw her in me. Now it sees you.”
Jessie crossed his arms. “Is it gonna try and be you?”
Zara grimaced. “No. Worse. It’s gonna try and finish what it started—with Echo. But through Todd.”
I blinked. “I don’t even finish group projects. I’m the last person it should be working through.”
Doug barked once.
Rachel just looked at me and said, “Welcome to the legacy.”
I stared at the altar.
The runes were glowing now.
Faint red. Almost like veins.
And in the center of the stone, where Rachel’s blood had touched, something was growing.
Not physically.
But spiritually.
Like an idea with teeth.
“Okay,” I said, clapping my hands together. “I vote we leave the emotionally sentient altar and the whispery nightmare trees and go back to camp. Maybe try the zipline. Or the cafeteria. I heard they’re serving haunted macaroni today.”
Rachel didn’t laugh.
Jessie didn’t even smirk.
Zara didn’t move.
And Doug just stared into the tree canopy like it was counting down to something.
And maybe it was.
Because whatever had welcomed Rachel back?
It wasn’t done yet.
Not by a long shot.
Scene 5: “Memory Sap and Emotional Explosions”
It started with a drip.
Just a single, syrupy bead of iridescent amber sliding from the twisted bark of the whispering tree like it had a nosebleed full of glitter and dread. It hit the stone altar with a sound that didn’t make sound—it made memory. And I, because I am who I am, leaned in closer.
“Don’t touch it,” Rachel said.
Which, naturally, meant my finger was already one inch away from touching it.
“Seriously, Todd. Don’t—”
I poked it.
The second my finger brushed the sap, I knew three things for certain:
- This was not sap.
- My body was not ready.
- I had made a spectacularly Todd-shaped mistake.
The world shifted like someone grabbed the edges of reality and gave it a lazy swirl. The forest rippled. The trees shuddered. And my brain short-circuited into a movie theater someone forgot to dust.
I saw her again.
Echo.
Not a projection this time. Not a flicker or vision.
A full sensory injection of who she was. How she felt. What she endured.
I was inside it.
Not literally. But emotionally? Spiritually? Psychically? Whatever. My soul was wearing her skin like a borrowed hoodie—too tight and stained with betrayal.
She was back in the clearing, clutching that scroll again. Her fingers were bloody, her eyes were wild, her mouth half-open like she wanted to scream but had already used up all her air on hope. The altar glowed behind her, casting her shadow into something long and monstrous.
She looked up, whispering, “They promised.”
Then it happened.
She twisted. Not physically—though yeah, her bones made that noise—but more like her magic was being cranked inside out. The spell etched into the altar flared violet. Her body jerked. Her veins lit up. The scroll hissed. The runes on her skin bled light.
She didn’t just scream.
She shattered.
All her grief. All her rage. Every promise broken, every counselor who smiled while knowing, every camper who looked away. It exploded out of her like weaponized sorrow, burning everything she’d ever been into something else. Something older. Angrier.
Something made of pain.
Her face melted into light, her voice fractaled into chaos, and her last words before the vision snapped were, “I waited.”
I came back to myself choking on air that wasn’t mine, heartbeat stuttering like it couldn’t decide whose rhythm to follow.
And my eyes—oh god.
Everything looked wrong. Too sharp. Too close. Too alive.
Jessie was in front of me, shirtless of course, eyes wide with concern. “Todd?” he asked.
I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t speak.
Rachel grabbed my face with one hand, the other already pulling a warding charm from her belt.
“Hold still,” she ordered.
I did not hold still. I trembled like a Jell-O mold at a seance.
She pressed the charm against my chest. It sizzled. My tattoo flared. Something inside me screamed—but it wasn’t me.
And then everything went white.
When I opened my eyes again, I was on the ground, in Jessie’s lap, face buried in his very warm, very ab-ridden chest. I was also sobbing. Just a little. Okay, a lot.
“I’m fine,” I gasped between hiccups.
“You’re not fine,” Rachel snapped. “Your pupils were gone. Your aura went full banshee. And you reek of ectoplasmic trauma sweat.”
Zara knelt beside us, eyes soft. “You touched her pain, didn’t you?”
I nodded into Jessie’s torso. “It was awful. She didn’t want this. She didn’t ask for this. They used her.”
Doug barked once. Quietly. Like he agreed but also didn’t want to ruin the mood.
Jessie stroked my hair with one hand and muttered, “It’s okay. We’ve got you.”
And for one tender, snot-filled moment, I let myself believe that.
That maybe I wasn’t just the joke. The walking warning label. The sarcastic sidekick.
Maybe I was the legacy.
The problem was, legacy didn’t feel heroic.
It felt like heartbreak.
It felt like pressure.
It felt like screaming inside trees.
Rachel stood and walked to the altar again. “She’s not gone,” she said. “Echo… she’s still here. In this grove. In this spell. In you.”
I peeled my face off Jessie’s chest. “Well that’s rude.”
Zara touched the tree, her fingers just barely brushing the bark. “We’re inside her story now. That vision? It wasn’t a glimpse—it was a page.”
Jessie frowned. “A page in what?”
Doug answered, because of course he did.
“A contract.”
We all looked at the altar.
Where the sap still glowed.
And beneath it, carved into the stone, was something none of us had seen before.
A date.
Seven days from now.
Jessie helped me to my feet. Rachel crossed her arms. Zara lit another black candle—it flared, hissed, then melted down in five seconds flat.
Doug whined.
And I said, “Cool. So I emotionally bonded with a traumatized contract ghost and now I’m on her cursed calendar. Love that for me.”
The wind picked up, carrying a single whispered word:
“Soon.”
And somewhere, deep in the forest, something started laughing.
But it wasn’t joyful.
It was the sound of a girl who waited too long to be saved.
Scene 6: “The Forest Shifts. Reality... Glitches?”
It started when the path behind us disappeared. Like, poof—nothing. One second we had a clear trail of trampled moss and broken twigs, and the next? Just a solid wall of trees that hadn’t been there thirty seconds ago.
“Okay,” I said, pointing at the aggressively fresh forest. “That was not like that before. Right? Right? Tell me I’m not hallucinating again.”
Jessie sniffed the air. “You’re not hallucinating. Unless we all are. In which case, congrats on the group psychosis.”
Zara narrowed her eyes, her fingertips grazing the bark of a nearby tree. “No. We’re not high. We’re caught.”
“In what?” I asked. “A hallucination? A dream? A metaphor for my emotional availability?”
She stepped back slowly. “A loop.”
The air had changed too. It was… thicker. Not humid, not smoky—just emotionally dense, like the forest had finally decided to stop pretending and was now aggressively grieving in our direction.
Doug floated up through the underbrush like a ghostly periscope, ears low, tail tucked. He barked once. A low, distorted sound. Then he flickered.
Doug. Flickered.
That was my last nerve. Consider it snapped.
“We’re trapped in a glitchy emotional forest hellscape that eats dogs,” I announced. “That’s the sentence I’m going to be whispering in therapy for the next seven decades.”
Rachel, unbothered as always, tossed a rune stone down the trail. It arced beautifully through the air… and came back.
Boomerang-style.
It nailed her in the shin.
“Yep,” she said. “We’re loop-locked. Sentient memory field. Echo’s trauma is tethered to the land. And guess who’s emotionally compatible?”
She pointed at me.
“Lucky me,” I deadpanned. “The Forest’s Favorite Punching Bag.”
Jessie crouched, placing a hand on the moss. He sniffed it once. Grimaced. “It smells like fear. And old gym socks. But mostly fear.”
Zara was scribbling frantically in her spellbook, muttering something about echomantic displacement and rune corruption. “We need a grounding anchor. Something real. Something stable.”
I raised my hand. “I once cried during a dog food commercial. That real enough?”
Nobody laughed.
Well, Doug barked, but it was more of a worried yip than a chuckle.
Jessie stood, flexed his shoulders like he was preparing for a bare-chested sprint through a Blair Witch maze, and said, “I can scent-track us out.”
“Out of a memory loop?” I asked. “You think your were-nose is strong enough to sniff through time?”
He sniffed anyway.
Paused.
Then said, “I smell... fifth grade?”
The wind twisted.
A faint echo rippled through the trees: “Don’t forget your juice box, Toddie.”
I froze. “That’s my mom.”
Jessie tilted his head. “Your mom’s in the woods?”
“No!” I shouted. “That was from the woods. It just threw a memory at me!”
Rachel let out a long sigh and dropped her warded compass on the ground. The needle spun, stopped, then spun the other way.
“Reality is rewriting around us,” she muttered. “Like a supernatural editing software glitch. We’re in Echo’s final hours—replaying like a cassette tape held together by regret and moss.”
“Oh good,” I said. “A nostalgia trap. Because nothing says summer camp like magical gaslighting.”
The trees creaked.
And moved.
Not swayed—moved.
A whole row of them shuffled five feet to the left like they were playing forest chess and we were the slow, confused pawns.
Doug let out a whine and floated straight up above the canopy. From below, he looked like a glowing ghost balloon. He barked twice. His body pulsed a warning in soft white light.
“Uh,” Zara said, “he’s trying to tell us something.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “‘Run, the trees have opinions?’”
The trees opened their metaphorical mouths and answered with an actual voice.
Not one voice. Dozens. A chorus. Male, female, old, young—voices I didn’t recognize and voices I did. Some of them were mine.
“Stay. Stay. Stay. It’s safer here.”
Rachel grabbed my wrist. “It’s not safer. It’s stickier.”
Zara threw salt over her shoulder. It hovered in midair. Refused to fall. And then burst into petals.
We were officially in narrative quicksand.
Jessie paced like a wolf caught between fights. “We can’t go forward. We can’t go back.”
“Sideways?” I offered, completely serious.
Doug descended like a slow-motion warning and floated in front of us, barking once.
Then the moss beneath our feet rearranged itself. Into words.
HELLO TODD.
“Oh no,” I breathed.
A second message appeared beside it:
WE REMEMBER WHAT YOU ARE.
Rachel’s hand went to her stake.
A third line burned itself into the moss.
YOUR CHOICE.
Zara turned to me, pale. “I think the forest wants you to decide.”
“Decide what?” I asked. “What to do? What to say? Who to sacrifice?”
Jessie: “Where to order pizza? Because I’m starving.”
More moss shimmered.
SEVEN DAYS.
“Okay, no pressure,” I said, wiping sweat from my forehead. “Just the trees, the ghosts, and the legacy of a girl who got eaten by a contract all expecting me to fix this because I touched the wrong sap and glowed at the wrong altar.”
Doug licked my hand. It felt cold, like winter nostalgia.
I looked up at the trees.
“Fine,” I said. “You want a choice?”
The woods shivered.
“I choose... to figure this out. But not now. Right now, I choose not dying.”
The wind whooshed.
The forest clicked.
Like something reset.
And suddenly, the path behind us was back.
Rachel blinked. “Did... you just hack the emotional ecosystem?”
“I guess?” I said. “With sarcasm and fear.”
Jessie clapped me on the shoulder. “Proud of you, dude. That was very ‘main character in a discount prophecy’ of you.”
Doug barked once.
And the wind whispered one last word.
“Soon.”
I didn’t know what was coming next.
But I had a feeling the trees did.
Scene 7: “Todd and the Root That Talks Back”
I was not okay.
Which, let’s be real, is basically my brand now. But this was a new flavor of not-okay: root-wrapped, emotionally vulnerable, existentially glitched not-okay. The kind that ends with you either crying into someone’s enchanted cloak or agreeing to give your soul to a sentient fern. And I was dangerously close to both.
We’d been walking in looping circles for what felt like forever. The trees were done with our drama, the air had gone heavy with moss-scented disapproval, and I—Todd Avery, poster child for accidental magical entanglement—was exhausted in my bones.
So I sat.
On a log.
A perfectly innocent, perfectly normal, totally safe piece of fallen tree.
Until it sighed.
I froze mid-sulk. “Please tell me that was Jessie.”
“Nope,” Jessie said from twenty feet away, wrist-deep in a patch of emotionally uncooperative mushrooms. “I only sigh when I do squats. And this ain’t that.”
The log sighed again. This time louder. Breathier.
Like a tree was trying to flirt.
Then a root curled up from the dirt, gently—almost affectionately—wrapping around my ankle.
“Uh, guys?”
Rachel turned. “If something’s growing on you, kill it.”
“It’s not growing,” I said. “It’s…talking?”
Zara, who had been quietly sketching anti-glitch runes into the dirt, lifted her head. “Talking how?”
“Like…” I hesitated. “Emotionally?”
Rachel’s knife was instantly out. “That’s not a type of talking.”
But before I could move—before Rachel could chop the log in half like a wood ninja—the root pulsed. And I heard it.
Not with my ears.
With… my bones?
A voice, low and soft and as ancient as the first bad haircut: “She thought someone would stop it. She waited.”
I blinked. “Wait. Who? Who’s she?”
The root tightened slightly, not unkind, just… firm. “She waited for help. It never came.”
“Echo,” I whispered.
The forest stirred.
The log sighed again.
“She gave everything. It wasn’t enough.”
Jessie had crept closer, now crouching like he was ready to pounce. “What’s it saying, dude? Does it want snacks or blood? Please let it be snacks.”
I didn’t answer. My breath hitched.
The root coiled a little higher up my calf, pulsing in time with my heartbeat. “She became the memory because the memory was all that listened.”
I swallowed. My voice cracked when I asked, “Can we help her?”
There was a long silence. The kind that feels like a thousand years leaning on your shoulder.
Then the answer came: “Yes. If you stay. If you give what she gave.”
I stiffened. “Wait. What does that mean?”
But I knew.
Rachel knew too—because she crossed the space between us in a blink and slashed the root away from my leg in one smooth, vicious motion. It curled back, bleeding a weird amber fluid that smelled like sorrow and cedarwood.
“Absolutely not,” she snapped. “We are not sacrificing Todd for sympathy bark.”
The forest went still.
Like we’d offended it.
Which, yeah, we probably had.
“Hey,” I said, slightly offended on my own behalf. “You didn’t even ask if I wanted to sacrifice myself.”
Rachel pointed her knife at me. “Todd. I love you. But your judgment is one sneeze away from unlocking another cursed dimension.”
Zara joined us, her eyes glowing faintly with divination residue. “It wasn’t offering a clean trade. It was tempting you into binding yourself to the memory. That’s how Echo got pulled under. Not all at once. Piece by piece. Consent, but...manipulated.”
Jessie muttered, “Like a magical timeshare scam.”
Doug appeared behind us, hovering low and growling.
The root retreated.
But I was still shaking.
Not from fear. From almost. That root had known exactly what to say. It had whispered grief and guilt and a chance to fix something. I hadn’t heard a bargain. I’d heard a confession.
“She wanted to be remembered,” I whispered.
The root, now distant, pulsed once more. Not like a heartbeat. More like a farewell.
“Memory is a form of magic. Some forget. Some become.”
Then it crumbled into dust.
Just like that.
Gone.
The log beneath me sagged into itself. Hollowed.
Rachel turned, tucked her blade away, and offered her hand.
“You okay?” she asked, softer than usual.
“No,” I said. “But I’m used to it.”
She helped me up. Jessie tossed me a bottle of enchanted Gatorade. Doug licked my hand with ghost slobber that tingled like menthol and childhood comfort.
Zara looked up at the canopy. “She’s still here. Watching. Listening.”
“Waiting,” I added.
Rachel looked grim. “Not anymore.”
We all turned to her.
“She’s not waiting anymore,” Rachel said. “She’s preparing.”
The wind carried her words away.
And the trees listened.
Because they always do.
Scene 8: “Echo Whispers from the Canopy”
We weren’t supposed to reach the edge of the forest.
Every path had bent away, every clearing turned into another cursed loop, every tree whispered back at us like the forest had social anxiety and a grudge.
So when we finally broke through the foliage and stepped onto a ridgeline of moss-covered stone, I half-expected the sky to scream.
Instead, it just… sighed.
And then it spoke.
Not with words.
With leaves.
I looked up and froze mid-step.
The canopy above us shimmered—leaves curling unnaturally into place, reshaping themselves like a green, windblown typewriter. One by one, branch by branch, a sentence formed against the graying sky.
LET ME OUT.
Rachel swore softly under her breath.
Zara’s divination candle sputtered to life in her palm, unlit, but still reacting.
Doug—the world’s least reassuring ghost dog—began to flicker. His eyes dimmed. His entire form pulsed like a corrupted gif trying to buffer emotion.
Then, in a voice that no dog should ever have—human cadence, ghost-filtered static—he said:
“You have seven days.”
We all went still.
“Before she walks again.”
Jessie, who had been squatting heroically with his nostrils flared like a werewolf on a detective show, blinked. “Seven days?”
Rachel clenched her jaw. “That’s a curse timer. Someone activated a countdown.”
Zara pulled a notebook from her coat—pocket dimension, probably—and flipped through it like she was cross-referencing the apocalypse with her grocery list.
“Seven days…” she muttered. “Wait.” She stopped, circled something in glitter gel pen, and looked up with a mixture of horror and logistical concern.
“That’s prom weekend.”
“Prom?” I asked, dazed.
Jessie perked up. “Wait, we still get to go to prom?”
Zara didn’t answer. She was too busy calculating magical fallout scenarios between bouts of eyeliner-adjusted panic.
Doug shuddered and drifted back down to earth like a haunted helium balloon in mourning.
I stared up at the leaves again. The message still floated above us, motionless, accusatory. LET ME OUT.
Rachel drew a charm from her belt and crushed it in her fist. “She’s not asking anymore. She’s warning us.”
Jessie, now at my side, rubbed the back of his neck. “Echo’s getting stronger. Whatever we saw before—whatever’s trapped here—it’s waking up.”
“I don’t want to be here when she stretches,” I muttered.
Rachel gave me a sidelong glance. “That’s the first thing you’ve said today that makes sense.”
The wind shifted. Cold. Wet. It smelled like mildew, decayed magic, and regret—my three least favorite scents.
Behind us, the forest groaned. Not the creaky, charming groan of spooky trees on a budget—but the guttural, foundation-shaking grind of roots rearranging destiny.
The sky above pulsed again.
New letters began to form.
YOU KNOW MY NAME.
My blood ran colder than Zara’s exes.
Jessie pointed upward, squinting. “Okay, is it just me or is she writing faster now?”
Doug let out a low bark, not playful—more like “Get off my lawn, you temporal threat.”
Rachel inhaled sharply. “She knows we found the contract. The chamber. The memory pool.”
“She knows I touched the mural,” I said, my voice cracking on the word “touched” like it was code for something scandalous, which, I mean… it kind of was.
Zara reached over, grabbed my sleeve, and muttered a stabilizing charm just in case I decided to combust again. Or sneeze magic. Same difference.
I stared at the canopy. “She said let me out. But what if she’s already half-out?”
Rachel pressed her palm to the ground. “Then we have seven days to make sure she doesn’t finish the job.”
The forest held its breath.
Doug flickered one last time, then stabilized, his tail slowly wagging with residual dread.
“I don’t want to fight a memory monster on prom night,” I said. “I was kind of hoping to awkwardly slow dance and maybe survive dessert.”
Jessie slung an arm over my shoulder. “Well, buddy, looks like we’re doing ritual combat and slow dancing in the same forty-eight hours.”
Zara’s eyes glowed faintly as she flipped shut her book. “We’ll need weapons. Wards. And probably backup glitter.”
Rachel stood, hair windswept, cloak flaring dramatically even though there wasn’t any actual wind. “This isn’t a rescue. It’s an exorcism.”
Doug barked twice, then growled one word through clenched spectral teeth:
“RUN.”
Then the canopy exploded.
Leaves tore free in a cyclone of emerald and shadow. Roots surged from the earth like grasping fingers. The fog barreled in from the treetops and screamed.
Not howled.
Screamed.
We bolted.
Through branches, over stones, past memories.
The forest chased us. Or maybe it was Echo.
Or maybe—just maybe—this place wasn’t haunted by her.
Maybe she was the place now.
And she’d finally remembered how to speak.