The world beyond the cabin door wasn’t the forest.
It wasn’t any world Amara recognized.
It was a corridor of flesh.
Walls pulsed with veins and sinew, slick with something that smelled like rot and old magic. The ground squelched beneath her boots. Above her, the ceiling breathed—rising and falling like a massive beast slumbered just above the skin of the realm.
She kept moving forward.
Each step took effort, as if the air had weight. Time bent strangely here; the silence was oppressive, pierced only by the occasional whisper that didn’t belong to any voice she knew.
Until it did.
“Why do you still pretend?”
She spun.
There—reflected in a jagged shard of bone protruding from the wall—was her. Not as she was now, but younger. Softer. The Amara who believed she belonged to the pack
