There's a sound the forest makes when you're not listening.
It's not wind, not insects, not the rustle of branches. It's something deeper—a hum beneath the bones, like reality cracking at the edges. And after what we've seen, I've started to wonder if that hum is not just a warning—but a chorus. A song.
A song waiting for its final verse.
We didn't talk much after the loop. The silence wasn't emptiness—it was loaded. Heavy with suspicion, with dread, with the knowledge that this time we hadn't returned the same. We weren't synced. The past had us now.
Ambrose sat by the window of the cottage, staring at his hands. The faint glow had stopped, but he kept flipping them back and forth, as if they might betray him again. "Feels like I'm holding static," he muttered once.
Bobby was scrawling notes like a man possessed. Pages piled up around him. Equations. Timelines. Emotional diagrams, if that's even a thing.
Jacob barely spoke.
Me? I tried writing. It's the one thing that usually clears my head. But every page felt... unreliable. Like the moment I put something down, it shifted behind me.
That was the first clue.
Day One in the Past
We confirmed it when Jacob called his wife. She answered on the second ring, happy, laughing.
"I'm so glad you called early today," she said. "I was about to head into the office."
Jacob's face paled. "What day is it?"
"Monday, love. The 8th."
He looked at me. Mouth dry.
It was the 21st when we entered.
A Glitch in the Pattern
Bobby tried syncing two pocket watches. One in the rift. One outside. The one inside moved slower—but only slightly. On paper, time had crawled. But emotionally? We'd been in there for weeks.
"Perception's a construct," he muttered, not looking up.
Ambrose nodded sagely. "So is my sense of responsibility."
We laughed, but it felt hollow. Because I'd started noticing other things. Little things.
Like the message on my phone that I didn't remember writing. Just two words: You're late.
Or the old man from the rift... appearing in the corner of my dream. No movement. Just watching.
And then there was the mirror.
I swear I saw myself blink when I didn't.
Bobby's Discovery
It came late one night.
He burst into the room like a storm. "We're not in a loop. Not exactly."
We blinked at him. He slammed down a map of the forest—marked with red lines and coordinates.
"It's a spiral," he said. "Not a circle. A progression. Every time we return, we're just slightly... offset."
Jacob frowned. "What does that mean?"
"It means we're not revisiting the same place. We're visiting new ones that look almost the same. Like grooves on a record."
I felt cold. "And what happens when we reach the center?"
Bobby didn't answer.
The Vision
That night, I dreamt again.
I was standing in the shimmer. Evelyn beside me. But this Evelyn looked older. Not aged—worn. Like a photograph left in the rain.
"The song's almost done," she said.
I turned. "What song?"
She looked up at the sky—where a crack was forming. Light spilled through it like veins of gold.
"You've always heard it," she whispered. "You just didn't know you were part of it."
Then the world folded in.
Waking Doubts
I woke up with a pain in my chest. A pressure, like something left unfinished.
I went to my journal. Opened to the last entry.
But it wasn't my handwriting.
It was neater. Tighter.
Don't trust him.
My hands trembled. I looked into the mirror.
And for one heartbeat—I didn't recognize my own eyes.
Day Three
We decided to stay in the cottage. No more nodes. Not yet.
Ambrose made dinner. Burned the rice, naturally.
"Even in alternate dimensions," he said, "I can't cook worth a damn."
But it was good. It felt normal. That's what made it terrifying.
Because normal was the lie now.
Jacob told me quietly later, "I'm starting to think we didn't survive that last entry. Maybe this is... I don't know. The echo."
He didn't say it again. But the fear stayed in his eyes.
The Object
We found it in Bobby's backpack.
A stone. Smooth, etched with symbols none of us recognized. Cold, even in the sun.
He didn't remember packing it.
Ambrose made jokes about cursed artifacts. But none of us touched it after that.
That night, the symbols glowed faintly.
Bobby Cracks
On Day Five, Bobby snapped.
He threw his notebooks into the fire.
"They're wrong," he shouted. "The math's all wrong. It doesn't matter how we map it—it bends when we're not looking. It learns."
I tried to calm him. But something in his eyes told me he wasn't wrong.
Not entirely.
Foreshadowing
There's a carving on the wall of the cottage.
We'd never noticed it before.
A spiral, with a line drawn through it. And beneath it, in faded ink:
Some echoes become the song.
Evelyn's words.
But who carved it?
I traced it with my finger.
And for a moment—just a blink—I heard her voice.
"Almost there."
Day Seven
Jacob came to me in the morning.
"I had a dream," he said. "I was holding your journal. But it wasn't you I was reading about. It was me."
"What did it say?" I asked.
He looked away. "That I left you behind."
We said nothing else.
Personal Entry — Alex's Journal
I don't know if I'm the original anymore.
There are too many versions of us. Too many timelines. Too many layers.
I saw myself walking away in a reflection today.
And I didn't follow.
That scares me more than anything.
Because I think... maybe he knows what's coming.
Maybe I'm the echo.
And he's the song.