The next morning, the air around the cottage felt stale. Not in the physical sense—it wasn't humid or musty—but emotionally. Like a room that had held too many secrets for too long.
We hadn't spoken much since returning. Everyone moved carefully around each other, like we were made of glass, afraid even a glance might shatter the delicate balance we were pretending to uphold.
Ambrose was the first to say it.
"So... are we gonna talk about the fact that Evelyn just vanished into thin air? Again?"
Jacob, who had been sitting on the edge of the porch with his hands clasped tightly, didn't turn around. "No point. Every time we think we understand something, the node throws a new version of reality at us."
"I don't care if she's a ghost, a glitch, or the forest's imaginary friend," Bobby muttered, hunched over his journal. "That shimmer, that new structure—none of it follows our earlier models."
"And yet it felt familiar," I said. "Like we'd been there before."
"You heard the voice. It welcomed us back," Ambrose added. "Creepy hospitality is still hospitality."
No one laughed.
Later that afternoon, Jacob suggested we map our memories.
"Just write down everything we remember from the past two days," he said. "All of us. Separate. Then we'll compare."
The exercise felt like homework, but we did it. After an hour, we laid our pages out on the kitchen table.
And then it hit us.
Small discrepancies. Alex remembered walking to the node at dawn; Bobby thought it was twilight. Jacob recalled Ambrose slipping on a mossy rock—Ambrose swore it never happened. And I—well, I remembered seeing Evelyn place a hand on my shoulder just before she vanished. No one else did.
"What the hell is this?" Jacob snapped.
"Different versions of the same loop," Bobby said. "We're all living slightly varied branches of the same timeline."
That's when Ambrose reached into his hoodie pocket.
"Uh, guys?" he said, pulling something out. "I didn't have this before."
It was a compass. An old one. The glass was cracked, and the needle didn't point north. It spun slowly in a figure-eight pattern.
"Where'd you get it?" I asked.
"No clue. But it was just... in my pocket."
Jacob leaned in. "There's an engraving."
The back of the compass read: 'The song remembers the echo.'
We all froze.
"She said that," I whispered. "Evelyn. Or the version of her we saw."
"It's not just time loops," Bobby said. "It's memory loops. Symbolic entanglement. The forest might be preserving versions of us—like echoes—until one of them becomes dominant."
"Or all of them fail," Jacob added grimly.
That night, I couldn't sleep.
I sat alone in the main room, staring at the journal I'd been keeping since we arrived. Pages and pages of everything we'd seen. I flipped back to the beginning. The handwriting looked like mine. The thoughts read like mine.
But it didn't feel like mine.
I turned to a blank page. Wrote three words.
Don't trust me.
And I didn't know why.
The following morning brought something stranger than déjà vu.
A phone call.
From Anita.
I hadn't told her we were back at the node. She wasn't supposed to know. But when I answered, her voice was filled with static, warped like an old cassette tape.
"Alex... you never called back. I waited, but you didn't come home."
"I—I've been here. We've only been gone a couple days."
"No," she said. "It's been three months."
"What?"
The call cut out.
When I checked the log, the number wasn't there.
I turned to Bobby, who was debugging his scanner.
"We might be... further out of sync than we thought."
He nodded. "I just got a message from my mom. She says we haven't spoken in over a month. But we called her last week. From here."
Ambrose walked in, rubbing his eyes. "I had the weirdest dream. We were in the shimmer again, but... Evelyn was there, and she wasn't. It was like she was skipping frames. Like a bad video."
"Dreams might be the only honest things we're getting," I muttered.
Jacob, silent until now, finally stood. "We need to go back in."
"You sure?" I asked.
"No," he said. "But this thing isn't going to stop. We need to find the root. Before it finds us."
The next dive into the node was different.
The shimmer didn't pulse. It whispered.
As we stepped through, it felt like we were pushing through fog that remembered being mist.
We emerged into a version of the forest that shimmered with cold light. The trees weren't green—they were violet. The sky above was frozen, like it was paused mid-storm.
And in the distance, a spire.
Dark. Towering. Covered in markings we had only seen in fleeting dreams.
"The anchor," Bobby whispered. "This is where the fold starts."
We approached it carefully. Ambrose joked that it looked like a wizard's tower from an old RPG. But his hands were trembling.
At the base of the spire, we found a door carved from obsidian. No handle. Just a symbol etched in—spiral inside a circle.
The compass in Ambrose's pocket clicked.
And the door opened.
Inside: silence. Not emptiness, but silence. Like the space didn't want to echo.
On the walls were images—versions of us. Not photos. Not paintings. Echoes. Shadow imprints. One showed Jacob holding something glowing. Another showed Ambrose... kneeling. Crying. Alone.
One showed me with my eyes completely black.
We said nothing.
In the center of the room, a pedestal. On it, a shard of mirror.
When I looked into it, I didn't see myself.
I saw a version of me that never entered the forest.
He was home. With Anita. Laughing.
I reached out.
The mirror cracked.
The tower trembled.
We ran.
When we exited the node again, it was still night. But the sky was wrong.
Stars didn't align.
Our watches didn't match.
We had been gone an hour.
But we returned a week before we left.
That night, I stared at my journal again.
The last page had changed.
In my handwriting, I had written: You saw what you could've been. Now you know what you must become.
And beneath it, a symbol:
A spiral inside a circle.