They had been walking for nearly twenty minutes when Suzie's lungs decided they had opinions.
Suzie stopped walking.
Her hand went to the nearest tree trunk — rough bark, solid, real — and she leaned against it with her head slightly down, pulling in slow deliberate breaths. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Her chest rose and fell with the focused effort of someone who was not panicking but was being very careful not to start.
*"Suzie."* Mrita was beside her in seconds, one hand on her shoulder, reading her face with the sharp attention of someone who notices things quickly.
*"I'm fine,"* Suzie said, which was mostly true. *"Just need a minute."*
She looked up and caught Gill's expression — he had moved closer without drawing attention to it, positioned just slightly between her and the open forest without making a show of it. He wasn't saying anything. He was just there. Suzie noticed and said nothing about it.
Ahead of them, half-hidden by the rise of the path, stood a banyan tree of extraordinary size. Its trunk was a community of roots — dozens of aerial roots descending from its wide branches and plunging back into the earth, creating a curtain of wood that made the tree look less like a single plant and more like a gathering of ancient things that had decided to become one. Its canopy spread out overhead like a held breath.
*"There,"* Mrita said, nodding toward it. *"We stop there."*
Nobody argued.
---
The three of them settled at the base of the banyan tree, backs against its enormous root curtain, the forest spreading out in every direction around them in shades of deep green and shadow. The ground here was cool and slightly damp beneath their hands. Above them, the canopy filtered the remaining light into something soft and scattered, like the inside of a lantern with the flame turned low.
Gill exhaled and let his head fall back against the roots. *"Okay,"* he said to no one in particular. *"I am also tired."*
Mrita laughed — a short, genuine sound — and sat cross-legged with the ease of someone who had done this a hundred times in a hundred forests.
Suzie unzipped her bag.
Out came the chips first — a crinkly packet that sounded enormously loud in the forest quiet, the kind of sound that makes you suddenly aware of how silent everything else is. Then the water bottle. She set both down in the space between the three of them without ceremony.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
No one needed to be told. Hands reached. The packet was torn open. The water bottle passed around in a simple, wordless rhythm — the kind of sharing that happens naturally between people who are tired in the same way at the same time. No one was keeping track of who took more chips or who drank longer. The forest had a way of stripping that kind of accounting away.
They ate. They breathed. The trees stood around them like patient witnesses.
The bag, when Suzie finally zipped it back up, was considerably lighter. Snacks — finished. Water — gone. What remained inside was the torchlight and the blood packet, cold and sealed at the bottom, pressing gently against the bag's inner lining like a secret with weight.
Mrita brushed her hands on her jeans and stood first. *"Ready?"*
Gill rolled to his feet. Suzie pulled the strap of her bag over one shoulder and stood.
They started again.
---
The forest shifted as they moved deeper into it. The trees grew taller and the undergrowth thickened, branches reaching across the path from both sides like hands almost touching overhead. The ground rose and dipped unpredictably. Roots crossed the path at ankle height. The sound of the city — which had already been faint — disappeared entirely, replaced by the occasional distant call of a bird, the creak of a branch with wind inside it, the sound of their own footsteps on old earth.
Mrita was reading the forest as she walked — eyes moving, head slightly tilted, body language that of someone listening to a frequency that required concentration. She had been here before, in some form. She moved with the instinct of a person who remembered.
Then the path curved slightly, and the cave appeared.
It wasn't dramatic. No yawning mouth, no gothic overhang. Just a wide, dark opening in the mountain's rock face, half-swallowed by vines and the roots of things growing above it, the darkness inside it thick and absolute. The kind of dark that doesn't welcome the eye.
Mrita walked past it without slowing.
Gill walked past it, glancing sideways with brief and practical wariness.
Suzie stopped.
She stood at the edge of the cave's opening and looked into the dark for a moment that stretched longer than it should have. Something was pulling at the back of her memory — a thread attached to something she had heard before, in a different context, in a different kind of urgency.
*When I opened my eyes, I was in a cave.*
Knight's words. She had almost forgotten them — But standing here now, with the dark breathing out of that opening and the smell of deep stone and something else — something warm and animal — rising up from inside it, the words surfaced with sudden and complete clarity.
*When I opened my eyes, I was in a cave.*
She stared into the darkness. Her heartbeat shifted slightly — not faster, exactly, but heavier.
*"I need to use the washroom,"* she said.
Mrita turned around. *"Here?"*
*"Just over there. I'll be right back."* she turned to the cave , gill and mrita waiting some distance from the cave Suzie slipped around the side of the rock face, and stepped inside.
---
The dark was immediate and total.
The moment the cave swallowed the last of the outside light, Suzie was blind. She could feel the space around her more than see it — the coolness of the rock, the way sound changed, bouncing differently off stone walls than it did off trees. The air inside was close and damp, layered with the smell of soil and something else — something alive in a way that made the hairs on her arms stand up without her permission.
Then the bats came.
