The chamber felt like it had been waiting for them. Not in the way a room sits empty, collecting dust and silence—but in the way a stomach waits to digest. The walls pulsed softly, just out of sync with the lights. Subtle. Sickly.
Lance leaned against the edge of the mural chamber's massive table, breathing shallowly, head angled down as Dario nestled into his side. His hoodie had darkened beneath both armpits, his hairline glistening again.
"Don't say it," he muttered, noticing Kenton's narrowed stare.
"I wasn't going to," Kenton lied. "You're sweating again."
Lance glanced at his sleeve. The fabric was slick—white, vaguely sticky.
"Sure," he mumbled, "my sweat is milk now, but maybe it's an allergy to bullshit."
Kenton blinked. "Do you… often develop psychosomatic dairy conditions when emotionally triggered?"
"That depends," Lance said flatly, "how often are people hunted down by reality-warping bovine cryptids and classified as leaky subjects by women with bomb-filled lunchboxes?"
Dario, as if on cue, sniffed at Lance's wrist and gave a slow, enthusiastic lick.
"Dario, no." Lance gently pulled his arm away, but the dog licked again, tail wagging softly. "This is not a sustainable hydration plan, buddy."
Across the chamber, Dani flipped a rune slate onto its back without comment. Her face didn't twitch, but something about her shoulders gave her away—half a beat of stillness longer than usual. She turned, dry as ever.
"There's the printer guy," she said. "Thought we lost him."
Lance let out a breath that could've been a laugh if it weren't so worn down. His voice was rough from disuse. He hadn't spoken much since Dani called him subject—since that word set a hook in the meat of him and tugged.
But the milk joke? That was his. Mostly.
And Dario was still warm.
He scratched behind the dog's ears, fingers trembling slightly.
"You okay?" Kenton asked, quieter now. Not analytical—soft. Which was weird, because the man looked like he stored his compassion in spreadsheets.
Lance didn't answer right away.
He kept his hand buried in Dario's fur. It grounded him. Not in a magic way. Not in a cured way. Just something real. Something here.
"I think," Lance finally said, "I'm starting to miss normal problems."
"Define normal," Kenton replied, eyes scanning a diagram of intersecting perception layers—squares inside triangles inside shapes that didn't have names.
"Printer jams. Coffee that tastes like regret. Wondering if I'll die alone in an apartment that smells like my dog."
He paused. Then added, "Now I'm wondering if I'll melt out of existence and take the local plumbing with me."
Kenton opened his mouth to respond, but Dani cut in, voice low and direct.
"You won't."
Lance looked up. "No offense, but that feels statistically optimistic."
"No," she said, crossing back toward the table, her footfalls barely audible on the runic floor. "Because if you go, it's not the plumbing that goes next. It's the rest of us."
The silence that followed wasn't tense. It wasn't warm either. It just was.
Kenton looked at Dani. She didn't look back.
Then she dropped a black disk onto the table—a pulsing schematic that projected a floating map of Hollow Reach. Symbols swirled like wind over the outskirts.
"We've got movement again," she said. "A pulse from under the orchard. Something waking. Feeding, maybe."
"Another cow?" Lance asked, dread leaking through the words.
Dani hesitated. "If only."
Kenton leaned in. "The orchard's older than the town. I thought the entryways were sealed."
"They were," Dani said. "Until now."
Lance swallowed.
Dario stood up suddenly, tail raised. A sound none of them had noticed until now—a low thrumming, like a heartbeat caught underwater—grew louder.
They turned toward the hall. The mural behind them hadn't moved.
But something beyond it had shifted.
Lance pressed his hand against Dario's side, letting the dog's breathing regulate his own. Just as he'd started to think, I'm still here, the lights flickered, and something beneath the chamber throbbed like lungs inflating in stone.
He looked at Kenton. Then Dani. He didn't joke this time.
"I don't think Hollow Reach wants us to leave."
Dani nodded once.
"Then we go deeper."
The trees changed first.
They had been brittle things on the edge of town—dead branches twisting into a sky that never quite got dark—but as the trio stepped deeper into Hollow Reach's orchard, the trunks began to lean. Just slightly. Just enough. As though they were listening.
Dani kept walking, jaw set, shoulders square. Every few feet she tapped her knuckles against her lunchbox of weaponized nonsense, as if checking it still obeyed her. Kenton followed close behind, silent but twitching, his fingers dancing along the surface of a clunky analog scanner strapped to his chest like a relic from a basement lab. It clicked softly, irregularly.
Lance was third. Always third.He didn't ask to be.
Dario padded beside him, ever-loyal, ever-blissfully unaware of how badly reality had frayed around the seams. Lance glanced at him, then back at his own hands—sweatless now. Not dry, though. The skin had begun to pearl with something off-white and sticky. A substance that smelled faintly of copper and spoiled vanilla.
He didn't say anything. Not yet.
Kenton, sensing something, muttered: "This place... the orchard isn't right. It's folding in on a geometry it never had."
"That's Hollow Reach," Dani replied, flicking her flashlight ahead. It didn't cut through the fog so much as get absorbed by it. "You want straight lines, try Kansas."
"I'm being serious," Kenton said. "These trees are entangled. Their growth patterns… they're not growing in physical directions. They're… predicting us."
"That's cute. They can take a number."
Lance didn't laugh. He just swallowed and wiped at his cheek—another smear of milk-sweat glistening on his fingertips. He let it drip to the leaves below. The ground hissed.
They walked in silence for a while longer. The path twisted. Or they did.
Eventually, the air itself began to feel… pulped. Like they were walking through the memory of breath.
Kenton stopped.
"Wait."
Dani turned.
"What."
Kenton held up the scanner. It had gone dead. No clicks. No hum. Just an eerie little mechanical inhale, as though it had forgotten how to function. His hands shook.
"They're watching."
"The trees?"
"No. Something further in. The orchard is the shell. There's something else beneath."
Dani exhaled. "Great. Any fun ideas about what it wants?"
"Want is a human word."
Lance almost said something—almost—but his throat felt filled with cotton and static. The inside of his skull ticked like it had termites.
Then:
Dario stopped. Growled. And didn't move.
Lance dropped to one knee beside him.
"What is it?" he whispered.
Dario didn't look at him. The dog's eyes locked onto a knot of twisted bark ahead—something large, hunched, pulsing faintly. Like a burl, or a tumor in the wood. Something that didn't belong. And from within it, came a sound.
Not a growl.Not a whisper.A word.
"Printer…"
Lance stumbled back. Dani caught his arm.
"What did you hear?" she asked.
"Nothing," he lied.
She didn't press.
But Kenton did. "We need to make a decision. There's an intersection up ahead. The orchard forks—if we go left, we follow the metaphysical feedback. It'll take us toward the rupture point. That's the source. The 'bad thing.'"
"And if we go right?" Dani asked.
"A town ritual site. It's buried. Forgotten. The locals call it 'The Mouth,' but nobody's sure if it's a metaphor."
Lance blinked. "Can I vote neither?"
"No," Dani said immediately. "Kenton?"
He looked at Lance. Then at Dario. Then at the oozing bark, where the voice had come from.
"We go left," Kenton whispered. "Because right isn't a ritual site. It's a mouth. A real one."
Dani nodded, turned. But before they moved, she gave Lance a quick glance.
"You good?"
He didn't answer right away. Then, just before following, he muttered:
"Define good."
"Still you?"
"...Define 'me.'"
She smirked, just a little. "There's the printer guy."
Lance almost smiled. But then Dario licked his wrist—lapping up the milk-sweat—and something slid in his peripheral vision.
A shape. Tall. Human-shaped. Head wrong.
It flickered between branches and vanished before he could blink.
He didn't mention it.
Because something bad was coming.
And it already knew his name.