Echoes in the Hollow

“The path ahead remembers more than we do.”

They moved without speaking, not from fear—but reverence. The monitors had returned to calm, but something had shifted in the room. Not in temperature or pressure, but in tone.

Hazel folded the map with the new overlays carefully, as if creasing a living thing. “It’s not a direction,” she said. “It’s a rhythm. Like it’s guiding us by pulse.”

Cairo nodded. “We follow the hum.”

It led them east of the ridge, past the break in the tree line that hadn’t been there yesterday. There were no tracks. No paths. Only the faintest vibration underfoot, barely perceptible but deeply felt—like a heartbeat held underground.

By midday, they reached the place Orion had told them of.

The Listening Hollow.

It wasn’t marked by signs, but by stillness. A clearing tucked within the forest where the wind didn’t dare speak. The air held its breath.

Cero was the first to step into it. He looked up, then crouched, placing his ear to the mossy ground.

“I hear drums,” he whispered.

Kai followed, slowly. No sound reached his ears, but his body responded—a tension released in his shoulders, his breathing synced to something deeper than breath.

Sienna moved last, her fingers trailing the trunks of five trees at the clearing’s edge. Each twisted upward like searching hands.

“The map doesn’t want us to read it anymore,” she said. “It wants us to feel.”

They rested there. No gear unpacked. No fire built. Just presence.

And as the light shifted, something else did too.

In the soft soil, beneath their boots, lines began to glow—briefly, faintly. Spirals again. Then vanished.

Hazel documented what she could, but most of it couldn’t be captured. How do you record recognition?

Orion, arriving later than the others, simply said, “You heard it, didn’t you?”

Kai nodded.

“We’re almost there,” Orion said, voice low. “Not to the Well. To the memory that built it.”

They didn’t ask what that meant.

They just listened.