The ground was warm, unusual for someone used to cold tiles.
Mildred lay on his back, staring upward. The canopy above him was so thick it had eaten the sky whole, there were no stars, no ceiling, just an endless black gap between branches that hadn't stirred once since he opened his eyes. The nearest tree trunk pulsed with amber light, slow and steady, the glow coming from somewhere deep inside the wood.
He sat up slowly, disoriented for a second.
It was all forest around him, no apartment, no Margaret. There was no sound of footsteps dragging up the stairs, no locks clicking, no low deep voice bleeding through the wall.
He pressed his palm flat against the ground, and it was warm. Like the whole forest was pulling in slow, quiet breaths at a frequency beneath sound.
He stood and dusted his clothes.
He stared down at his hoodie, his jeans. The tear at the knee, same as always. His too small shoes with his toes curled in the same cramped way they always were. He patted his pockets and felt the twenty-three forty-seven in loose change, his phone dead and cold, screen black and gone for good.
He was exactly who he had always been. Nothing had changed. Nothing seemed to be handed to him either.
Then suddenly, a glowing panel appeared in the air in front of his face.
『STREAMING SYSTEM INITIALIZING..』
『CURRENT VIEWERS: 0』
He stared at it, the zero blinking back at him in slow rhythms.
He dismissed it with a thought, and it vanished the instant he wanted it gone, obedient in a way that nothing in his life had ever been.
Then he heard something.
Or rather, he felt the shape of something not heard. The forest had been completely still, and then a pocket of that silence shifted somewhere behind him and to the left, the way a room changes when someone steps into it without a word. A presence that didn't announce itself, it just arrived.
Mildred turned his head slowly.
There was nothing but darkness between the trees. Thick, solid darkness, the kind that didn't just block light but seemed to swallow it whole. The glowing trunks threw just enough amber light to see three or four feet in any direction before the world stopped. Beyond that, nothing.
He took one step forward.
The twig under his shoe snapped like a small bone, and then he went still.
The pocket of silence moved again. Not towards him, though. It just shifted and adjusted the way a predator does when it's received new information and is quietly deciding what to do with it. Deliberate, in no particular hurry.
Mildred had grown up in a house full of things that moved in the dark. He had learned young, which sounds meant danger and which meant safety, but for now, this one had the texture of the second kind.
A smaller panel blinked into existence in front of his vision while he was evaluating his surroundings.
『SYSTEM TIP: MOVEMENT DETECTED.
RECOMMEND: FIND HIGH GROUND』
He looked up without answering it.
The nearest tree had its first branch at about eight feet. The bark was thick and ridged, the trunk too wide to wrap both arms around, which meant he would have to manage on grip alone. His shoes were useless for climbing, and he knew it before he even jumped but began climbing regardless.
He caught the branch on the first try. His hands locked around the rough, warm bark, and he pulled up against gravity. His arms had never been strong, after all he was the boy who ate once a day when Margaret forgot to care, and twice on the days Mr Desmond slipped bread into his bag before school but fear has a muscle all on its own, and right now his was working overtime.
One elbow over the branch, then a knee. Then he was up, breathing through his nose, straddling the wood with his back flat against the trunk and the dark below doing nothing he could see.
He kept climbing up, two branches, three. Until the trunk had narrowed enough to wrap both arms around, and the ground was far enough below that falling would mean something serious.
He stopped there. The forest below stayed still.
From up here, the glowing trees looked like something else entirely, like dozens of amber lights scattered through the dark, each trunk pulsing at its own rhythm, so the whole forest breathed in a slow, uneven stagger. He watched them carefully, his breathing steadied. For a long moment, it was almost peaceful.
He was cold, he was hungry. He had no weapon, no plan, and no idea what lived in this place or why the ground was warm when everything else felt completely indifferent to him.
What he had was a branch and the cold, familiar habit of waiting.
The panel drifted back into his vision.
『CURRENT VIEWERS: 0』
Still zero. He watched it the way he had watched ceilings his whole life, without hope, without expectation. Just watching because there was nothing else to do.
Then it changed.
『CURRENT VIEWERS: 1』
A name appeared beneath it, forming letter by letter, the text carved-looking and ancient, faintly contemptuous, like it had no business fitting inside a clean digital panel:
『✦ GOD OF FORGOTTEN THINGS ✦』: A boy in a tree, hiding from the dark. How original.
Mildred read it once and didn't respond.
He had been watched his entire life by people who found him either amusing or invisible, and he had learned early that responding was usually the wrong move. Gods, apparently, were going to have to earn more than one line before he gave them the satisfaction.
He shifted his weight on the branch, pulled his hoodie tighter and looked back down at the forest floor.
'.....'
Something was at the base of his tree.
He hadn't heard it arrive. Hadn't seen it cross through the amber glow of any of the pulsing trunks. It was simply there, the way problems always were, already present before he noticed them, already patient before he understood them.
It was dark, low to the ground. Its shape refused to settle into anything his brain could name.
And then, with the slow and total certainty of something that had done this many times before, it found the first ridge of bark.
And began to climb.