You explore the clearing

The clearing is quiet as you stagger in circles around the perimeter.

It is not the thick silence of the forest, heavy and watchful. Here it feels thinner, as though sound itself has been peeled away. The grass grows pale and brittle, its blades sharp enough to cut your fingertips when you reach down to touch. Pools of water reflect the colorless sky, but the ripples in them lag a half-breath behind your movements.

You move slowly. Every step is louder than it should be, crunching on grass that snaps like bone. The air smells of stone dust and copper.

You look down at your hands. The nails are no longer simply hooked — they are etched. Fine lines cut along their surfaces, curling like script you can almost read. When you turn your hands, the light from the pools catches in them, and for a moment you think you see letters spelling words you should know. Then they shift again, unreadable.

Your chest aches. You pull your shirt open. The ridges of hardened chitin along your ribs have changed. What were once random cracks now curve into patterns — spirals, sigils, grooves. They shine faintly as if something molten lies beneath, filling the cuts. Each breath stretches them wider. They are not just scars. They are carvings.

The word blooms in your mind, heavy and absolute. Not written. Not tattooed. Graven. Etched by hands not yours, cut into you without permission. A permanence you never asked for.

You stumble to the nearest pool and peer in.

The reflection stares back: glowing eyes, ridged chest, hair matted with ichor. But the water does not stop at skin. It shows what lies beneath, as though each ripple peels away another layer.

First, muscle. Your arms tremble with it, wiry cords already streaked with pale filaments.
Then bone. But the bones are marked, too — each one covered in lines, crosshatched and grooved like someone has been whittling you down from the inside.
Then memory. Not faces or places, but sensations: cold nights curled small and alone, silence pressed against you like a second skin, the endless ache of wanting something you could never name.

The pool whispers the truth: you have always been graven. Even before the forest. Even before the insects. Even before this. Every lonely hour, every hunger, every failed reaching — all of it has carved lines in you.

You stagger back, shaking your head.

“No,” you whisper. “That’s not… that’s not true.”

But the patterns on your ribs burn with a sudden heat, as though agreeing.

You claw at them, digging nails into the grooves. The flesh parts easily, splitting along the engraved lines like pages opening. Inside, instead of blood, there are more carvings — smaller, finer, too dense to read, etched into every layer of tissue. You tear deeper, frantic, peeling yourself open like a book, and the truth keeps repeating, cut into every surface:

Lonely. Lost. Empty. Yearning.

You fall to your knees, hands buried in your own chest. The pain is strange — sharp, yes, but not unbearable. It feels less like being wounded and more like being uncovered. Like you were always meant to be split this way.

The clearing responds. The grass rattles though no wind blows. The pools darken. On the far side of the open space, a stone rises — not grown, not built, but thrust up as though the earth itself could not contain it anymore. Its surface is flat, its face carved with grooves that mirror the ones on your body.

You stagger toward it, one hand pressed against your chest to hold yourself together.

The stone hums as you near. Its carvings shift, sliding along the surface like worms beneath skin. You lay your palm against it and the grooves flare with light. Your ribs flare with the same light in answer.

The carvings connect.

And then your mind splits.

Not with pain, but with revelation.

You see yourself, younger, smaller, alone in every memory. Not truly alone — always people around you, voices, bodies — but apart, cut off, like glass between you and them. Their laughter never reached. Their touch never lingered. You spent your life searching — for someone, something, a cure for the emptiness you carried like a parasite. You thought love might do it, or faith, or work, or even just endurance. But none of it filled you.

Because the emptiness was not a wound. It was your truth. The forest didn’t put this in you. It only carved it visible.

You scream and pound the stone with your fists until your nails crack. Chips of it fly off like flakes of bone, but every fragment reveals more carvings beneath, endless layers of truth engraved into its core.

You claw until your hands bleed ichor. You dig until your chest is raw. Nothing changes. The carvings go on forever.

You fall back, gasping.

Your skin has split wider where you dug. Beneath, your ribs gleam not white but glassy, etched through with sigils. The glow inside is stronger now, pulsing with your heart. Every beat feels like a chisel striking deeper.

You want to close yourself. To sew yourself back together. But the thought feels dishonest.

You can’t ungraven yourself.

The pools ripple. Their surfaces rise as though something presses up from beneath. Shapes emerge — not insects this time but statues, slick and shining with wet clay. They look like people. Dozens of them. But each face is hollow; gouged blank. Their bodies are covered in the same script you bear, lines crossing their skin in neat rows. They shuffle toward you across the brittle grass. When they move, the grooves across their flesh glow faintly. They are like you, engraved.

One reaches for your hand. Its touch is cool, clammy. When its fingers brush yours, the carvings on your arm flare bright. Images pour into you: memories that are not yours. A child left behind. A lover abandoned. An entire life spent hunting for something beyond the self, only to find nothing.

Every one of them is like you.

They press closer. Blank faces turned toward you, hands reaching. Their touch sears lines into your skin, new grooves forming over old ones. The pain is immediate, white-hot — but beneath it is recognition. You are not the first.

You are not even rare.

You are one in a long procession of the graven, all of you etched with the same truths: loneliness, yearning, emptiness. Each of you convinced you were singular in your hunger. Each of you swallowed by this place to be carved open and revealed.

You stagger back, but they follow. Their hands tear at your clothes, your skin. Wherever they touch, more grooves burn into you. Words you cannot read. Truths you do not want.

You scream, but the clearing swallows it.

You tear yourself free and run.

The statues follow only to the edge of the grass, then stop, blank faces turning as one to watch. They make no sound, no movement, only stand like sentinels, reminders.

You stumble into the far side of the clearing and collapse against another stone. This one is half-buried, but as you touch it, the grooves across your ribs blaze again.

And you see it — not just yourself but all the others. Thousands, hundreds of thousands, engraved and lost, wandering this endless forest. Each thinking themselves unique in their suffering, only to find the same truth etched into their marrow: that emptiness is not accident but design. That loneliness is not punishment but essence.

It is who you are.

You claw at your face, desperate to unmake it. Your nails tear skin, carving new grooves. The blood that runs is thick and black. It hardens on your cheek into shining script. You pound your head against the stone, trying to drive the truth out. The impact cracks your skull. Light leaks from the fracture. Not blood. Light, etched into the bone, spilling free like molten gold.

The clearing hums in answer. The pools boil. The statues bow their heads.

You scream until your throat splits.

The script carves itself into the air now, glowing lines that linger, curling around you like chains. They cut into your skin without touch, engraving you deeper, layer by layer, until there is nothing unmarked. When at last you collapse, trembling and raw, you are more script than flesh. Every surface of you carries words you cannot read. Your body is no longer your own. It is a tablet, a monument.

You lie there, staring at the sky. The color has shifted again — no longer pale but black, carved through with lines of faint light like cracks in stone. You realize you are not looking at the sky at all. You are looking at the inside of your own skull. You have peeled back so many layers that there is nothing left between you and the truth. The world you see is only yourself, endless, hollow, engraved.

The forest hums softly, approving.

You understand now.

You were always lost. Always lonely. Always yearning for something to fill the void. But the void is not wound. It is who you are. And nothing outside of you will ever change that. The carvings are not chains. They are mirrors.

Every groove on your body, every line in your bone, every crack in your skull — all of it only shows what has always been true: you are incomplete, and you always will be.

You close your eyes. The carvings remain. The glow remains.

There is no returning to human.

There is no returning at all.

There is only the engraving, endless and absolute.

And it is yours now.