Chapter 10: The Echoes of the Eaten

Chapter 10: The Echoes of the Eaten

Stepping through the curtain of vines was like passing through a one-way membrane. The world behind me vanished not just from sight, but from possibility. The air grew heavy, ancient, and still, saturated with a malevolence that was no longer playful or curious. I had debugged its simple traps and solved its introductory puzzles. The system’s response was to escalate, to move from environmental manipulation to a direct, brutal assault on the user. On me.

I was pushing deeper than Abernathy ever had. His notes grew more erratic and fragmented in the corresponding sections, the system of warnings and keys dissolving into pure, terrified scrawls. I was walking off the edge of his mad map, into the core of the machine. The path here was no longer a twisting lure; it was a straight, dark aisle, flanked by colossal trees that were more like monolithic pillars holding up a roof of starless night. It was a path with a clear destination, and the forest no longer hid that it was leading me toward it.

The first attack was not on my eyes, but on my memory. A scent, impossibly, drifted through the dead air. Lilacs. My mother’s perfume. A fragrance I hadn't smelled in the ten years since she passed. It was so vivid, so precise, it bypassed my conscious thought and struck directly at the heart of my grief. My stride faltered, my entire body tensing.

Then came the whisper. It wasn’t a sound that traveled through the air, but a thought that bloomed inside my own skull, stitched together with the perfect timbre of her voice.

You always run, Leo. You always choose the safe path.

A cold spike of adrenaline and horror shot through me. This was my deepest, most private insecurity. The quiet shame that drove my obsession with routine and control—the fear that at my core, I was a coward. The forest had reached into my mind, sifted through my memories, and found the sharpest blade it could twist in my gut.

I stumbled, one hand bracing against the cold, rough bark of a tree. My breath came in ragged, soundless gasps. For a terrifying second, I believed it. The grief, the fear, the shame—it was all real. I saw her face in the deep shadows between the trees, her expression not loving, but disappointed.

Look at you. Playing the hero. You’ll only get this girl killed, just like you let—

“No,” I choked out, the word a dry rasp. I squeezed my eyes shut and clutched the photocopied journal pages in my pocket, the crisp paper a flimsy anchor to the rules. This is not real. This is a function. An attack vector. I forced the terminology into my thoughts, building a firewall of cold logic around my heart. Illusion. Type: Personalized. Input: Memory. Goal: Induce despair.

When I opened my eyes again, the scent of lilacs was gone. The shadow that looked like my mother was just a shadow again. The whisper in my head faded, leaving behind a cold, slimy residue. The system had failed, but it had shown me its new capability. It could read me. And it would use everything I was against me.

My resolve hardened into something brittle and cold. This thing wasn't just a predator; it was a parasite that fed on the very essence of a person. I had to get the jogger out. I had to.

I pushed forward, walking faster now, my gaze fixed on the path ahead. And then I began to see them.

At first, he was just a flicker in my peripheral vision, a shape that didn’t belong. A man in old-fashioned tweed trousers and a thick woolen shirt stood beside the path, staring intently at a brass compass in his hand. He looked up, his face pale and gaunt, his eyes wide with a century of confusion. He glanced back down at the compass, whose needle was spinning in a frantic, useless circle. He shook it, tapped it, and looked up again, his expression of dawning horror repeating in a silent, three-second loop. I could almost feel the phantom bleed of his final thought: The numbers are correct. The land is not. Thomas Abernathy.

I froze, my blood turning to ice water. He wasn't a ghost. He was an echo. A data fragment, a corrupted file left behind on the system’s hard drive, forever executing its last command.

As I moved deeper, I saw more of them. A young woman in the brightly colored hiking gear of the 1980s, her face a mask of panic as she frantically patted her pockets, forever searching for a trail map that was no longer in them. Further on, a little boy, no older than ten, in denim shorts and a striped t-shirt, stood staring into a thicket of thorns, his expression one of heartbreaking loss. I could feel the shape of his despair, the psychic stain of it in the air: he had been chasing a red ball that had rolled just out of reach.

They were all here. The whispers from the archives, the forgotten missing persons cases, the silent victims the forest had consumed over the decades and centuries. They were not dead, not in a way I could understand. They were batteries, their consciousnesses powering this place, their last moments of terror and confusion replaying for eternity to sustain The Stillness.

They did not see me. They were locked in their own private hells, their gazes fixed on the illusions that had trapped them. As I walked past them, a terrible, silent chorus of their despair brushed against my mind—an endless loop of lost, where am I, I want my mom, it’s gone, the path is gone, lost, lost, lost.

I was walking through a graveyard of souls.

The jogger. The thought of her being here, her bright, cheerful energy reduced to a single, repeating loop of terror, was more horrifying than any illusion the forest could conjure from my own past. She wasn't just in danger of dying. She was in danger of being assimilated, of becoming another one of these psychic fossils.

The path began to slope gently downwards, leading into a basin where the trees were even larger, their roots thick as pythons breaking the surface of the soil. The echoes grew more frequent, the psychic static of their pain a constant, dull roar in the back of my mind. I forced myself to look away from them, to focus only on the path, on the mission. They were warnings. They were the fate that awaited me if I failed.

Then, as I reached the bottom of the basin, it all stopped.

The path opened up. The psychic noise of the echoes ceased, as if I had passed through a soundproof wall. The whispers in my own mind fell silent. The illusions, both personal and historical, vanished.

I stood at the edge of a vast, unnaturally perfect clearing. The air here was different. The silence was of another magnitude entirely. It wasn't just an absence of sound anymore. It was a presence. A crushing, physical weight that vibrated with ancient, unimaginable power. It was the absolute, perfect, foundational silence that Abernathy had scrawled about in his final, terrified moments.

I was no longer in the graveyard. I had just walked into the tomb.