Paranoia Peak

Arthur didn't remember walking back to camp. 

He didn't even remember standing up from the dried riverbed. One moment, he was staring into a scarred valley carved by a vanished river. The next, he was crouched beneath a lattice of broken branches and leaning poles — the tattered remains of his shelter. His hands trembled violently. His throat was raw from nothing. His skin clung to his bones like paper stretched too thin. 

The river was gone. 

The voice was not. 

It lived behind his eyes now, in the quiet folds of his brain, unspooling its words without sound or breath. Sometimes it echoed. Sometimes it whispered in fragments. Sometimes it just breathed, long and slow, as if resting inside his skull. 

He didn't sleep. 

That first night was long. Too long. It stretched, hour by hour, until it lost shape. He lay beneath his shelter with his arms wrapped tight around his chest, his knees pulled in, eyes wide open and dry. The air didn't feel like air anymore — it felt watched. Even the wind had weight. Every creak of wood sounded placed, intentional, like the forest was rearranging itself just beyond his line of sight. 

He waited for the howl. 

It never came. 

Only silence. A silence deeper than stillness. A silence that scraped at the base of his skull like a spoon on bone. Not the absence of noise — the rejection of it. As if the world had stopped pretending to be a world. 

By the time the sky lightened, he wasn't sure if he'd blinked. 

The second night was worse. 

He sat cross-legged, rocking slightly. His lips moved without sound. His thoughts circled like vultures. The river's voice echoed again — but this time, it was joined. Not by others exactly, but by other versions of himself. Fragmented, displaced, hollow imitations of his own voice, scattered like shards of mirror in a room with no walls. 

"You are the last," one whispered. 

"You were never here," said another. 

"You brought this." 

He pressed his palms to his ears. 

It didn't help. 

He packed the cavities with leaves and moss and bark, jamming them in so hard his ears bled. Still, the voices came. Not from outside — from underneath. Beneath his thoughts. A low static hum of Arthur-after-Arthur, like echoes in a canyon he'd never escaped. 

Then the itching began. 

He clawed at his own face, convinced the skin didn't belong to him. It was too smooth. Too tight. It didn't wrinkle when he moved. It didn't feel. His fingertips dug in, drawing blood. He stared at his palms and didn't recognize the stains. 

That was when the memories started. 

They weren't memories. 

But they felt like them. 

He remembered being a bear. 

Not dreaming it. Not imagining. Remembered. The weight of his limbs, heavy with fur and muscle. The raw, visceral power of his breath — not air, but a growl, a furnace roar with no need for language. He remembered the cold stink of blood in his nose. The snap of bones beneath his paws. 

And most of all, he remembered chasing. 

Not prey. Not food. Himself. 

He remembered thinking: 

That boy must die. 

He'd always been the bear, hadn't he? 

The boy was the mask. A costume. A disguise he wore while the truth hibernated. 

The guilt came next. 

He curled into himself and rocked faster. "I didn't mean to," he whispered. "I didn't want to. I was just hungry. I didn't know it was me." 

The shadows pulsed. Every flicker of flame from his dying campfire twisted the forest into jagged silhouettes — too tall, too narrow, too wrong. At one point, he saw himself sitting across the fire. Same face. Same dirty clothes. But the eyes were glass — not wet, not alive, just there. And when it smiled, the skin cracked like a carving in old wood. 

Arthur lunged. Stabbed the ground with a stick. 

The shadow vanished. But the air didn't settle. 

He didn't sleep the third night either. 

By dawn, his limbs felt too light. His joints bent wrong. His tongue was heavy and dry, a slug of meat in a mouth that didn't belong to him. His skin buzzed with thoughts — tiny, biting thoughts — most of which weren't his. 

He hadn't eaten. Barely drank. He didn't feel hunger. Or thirst. Or fatigue. Only motion. 

His legs moved. He didn't command them. 

They carried him to a ridge. He didn't remember choosing a direction — the forest simply opened before him like it had been waiting. The trees here were taller. Tighter. Their trunks twisted in impossible angles, branches whispering to each other in windless air. 

He climbed. 

Rocks tore at his hands. Branches snapped beneath his feet. He slipped more than once, rolled once, slammed his shoulder into a boulder and left blood behind. None of it registered. The pain was just another voice now — quieter than the rest. 

He reached the top at sunset. 

The world below stretched in all directions — endless forest, a sea of darkness shot through with flickers of movement that weren't trees. The sky above was still, painted in bruised purples and dirty reds. 

He didn't remember stopping. But when he looked down, there was a knife in his hand. 

A real knife. His old one. The one he thought he lost. 

The blade was dull. The handle wrapped in cloth. The edge hovered inches above his chest — just above the heart. Pressed lightly. Trembling. 

His hands weren't his anymore. 

He blinked. His mouth moved. "Why?" 

The word didn't echo. 

He didn't remember lifting the knife. Didn't remember unsheathing it. But now it was here. Heavy. Inevitable. As if the forest had led him to this peak not to see, but to end. 

He stared across the horizon. 

And the truth coalesced — not in his mind, but behind it. 

He had not been running from something. 

He had been chasing himself. 

Every shadow. 

Every whisper. 

Every thing that went wrong — it wasn't the forest. It was him. 

He brought the voices. 

He carried the infection. 

He called the river. 

And the forest? The forest was a reflection. A map drawn in madness. And he was the ink. 

He opened his mouth to scream. Nothing came out. 

The knife slipped from his fingers. 

It clattered on the rock, skidded over the edge, and vanished into dead leaves. 

He collapsed. 

Knees hit stone. Then hands. Then face. He curled forward like a child, body wracked with sobs that had no emotion left in them — just the rhythm of a nervous system trying to empty itself. 

His forehead pressed against the dirt. It was warm. Alive. Beneath the soil, he felt a pulse. A heartbeat. 

Not his. 

The forest's. 

It was alive. Not metaphorically. Truly. 

Not in leaves or roots or breath. But in design. In mind. It was a single thought spread across a thousand miles of trees and stones and rivers and silence. 

And he — Arthur — was now a part of that thought. 

Not a wanderer. 

Not a victim. 

A node. A nerve. A warning. 

A message to whatever watched the forest from beyond it. 

He stayed there for a long time. Maybe an hour. Maybe more. The wind curled gently along his back. The sun dipped further. And finally, for the first time in days, he closed his eyes. 

He didn't sleep. 

But he rested. 

Just a little. 

When he opened them again, the sky above was deep cobalt. Slow clouds drifted across it, illuminated faintly by moonlight. 

One looked like a spiral. 

Another looked like a hand. 

He stared at them, breathing. In. Out. Slow. Steady. As if the world, for a moment, had given him permission to be. 

The wind whispered through the branches behind him, and this time — for once — it didn't sound like voices. It sounded like wind. 

The world hadn't ended. 

But something in him had. 

He didn't know if it would come back. 

And he didn't know if he wanted it to.