Day 12
The thing about silence is that it stops being comforting once it begins to feel personal.
I've lived with it for twelve days—eaten with it, slept with it, and fought off its weight. I thought I understood the silence of extinction, but this… this silence follows me.
I can't prove it, but I feel it watching through the trees, standing just behind the edge of the firelight. It doesn't make noise, it doesn't breathe, and it doesn't move. But it waits.
I brought something back from the fissure. It isn't something I can touch, not even a memory—just a change. In the air. In me. In everything.
And it started with the symbols.
I recreated them from memory, burning them into slabs of bark using a sharpened coal shard. One by one—triangle, spiral, empty circle—then variations: lines connecting, lines detaching. Some nested, some inverted.
The triangle always comes first. It's not a coincidence; it's structure. Some logic. It's not language in the usual sense—no grammar, no syntax—but it's still communicating something.
Every pattern ends the same way: a circle with no center, like a lens, or a portal, or a warning.
I tried arranging them in different ways to let them speak through geometry. And when I stared long enough, they began to make sense—not as words, but as sequences.
This isn't writing; this is programming.
Last night, I collapsed without even eating and woke up choking on ash that wasn't in my lungs. I found myself in the fissure again, but everything felt wrong. It was broader, deeper, and lit from within by a cold fire. The glyphs floated in the air like snowflakes made of iron.
At the edge of the hallway stood someone else. Me. Or something wearing my face, older, scarred, drenched in soot and regret.
He didn't speak; he only looked at me and raised his hand, palm open. The glyphs behind him shifted, rotated, and reassembled. They hovered in the air and formed a door. Then they began to spin.
When they spun fast enough, the island cracked open. That's when I woke up. My fire had gone out, and all my traps had been triggered—yet nothing had been taken. Just disturbed.
I don't believe in magic; I believe in survival. I believe in cause and effect. But today, I broke my own rules. I gathered ash from last night's fire, mixed it with salt from the sea, and carved the triangle-spiral-circle around my shelter in a complete ring. I reinforced it with bamboo spikes, just in case.
A ritual? No, a reaction. A human response to a danger we can't name.
This isn't about belief; it's about not underestimating the unknown.
I've made a lot of traps in my life—for rats, for predators, for things I could see. This is the first one I've made for a concept.
During midday, while checking the perimeter, I felt a pulse. Not through my feet, not in the air—inside me. Like a second heartbeat deep in my bones. It lasted less than a second, then nothing.
But the symbols I had carved? They shimmered briefly, just a flicker, like sunlight on water. The perimeter still stands, but something tested it. And it knew what to look for.
I saw him again—the ridge figure. In broad daylight, with no mist, no tricks. He stood halfway up the slope, right foot slightly forward, as if he had been mid-step before freezing. No weapon, no movement, no attempt to hide. Just… watching.
I raised a spear, and he didn't move.
I blinked.
And then he was gone-no sound, no footsteps, no trail—not even a disturbed leaf. The forest swallowed him as if it owed him something.
The glyphs weren't made for me, but now they're in my mind. Even when I close my eyes, even when I sleep, I'm starting to draw them without thinking—on rocks, on bark, on my skin.
I catch myself whispering combinations out loud, like names I've never heard before. Something is speaking through the shape of things.
And the worst part is… it makes sense. Not like a voice, more like a blueprint I never knew I was trained to read.
I think the fire in the fissure wasn't just heat; it was memory. And memory doesn't die. It waits.
Tomorrow, I'm going back—not to open anything, not to explore. I'm going back because I think I've already started to change.
And if I don't understand what I'm becoming… I might become something I can't survive.