The Frozen Warning

The ruins emerge from the undergrowth like a held breath — a small clearing where the ferns have grown tall and undisturbed for what must be decades. At its centre stands a figure that stops you cold. A human, or what was once one, frozen in grey stone mid-stride, one arm outstretched as though reaching for something just beyond their grasp. The bark-markings etched across their petrified skin are identical to yours.

You step closer, heart hammering. Their face is turned toward the massive trunk behind them, and carved deep into the bark — gouged in desperate, uneven letters — are words that make the blood drain from your face: DO NOT FIGHT THE ROT. IT CANNOT BE BEATEN. ONLY HEALED. The message ends in a long trailing scratch, as though the hand that carved it stopped suddenly and never moved again.

Then you see it. Clutched in the stone fingers of the outstretched hand, pressed against the palm as if offered to anyone who might come after — a small glass vial, stoppered with a knot of moss. Inside, a liquid catches the dim forest light and shimmers like moonlight on still water: silver sap, thick and luminous, still somehow pristine after all these years. The previous candidate found the answer. They just found it too late.

The forest around you is utterly silent. No wind. No birdsong. Only the faint, distant sound of something vast and wet breathing in the dark ahead. Dawn of the third day is close. You have one chance left — and a choice the person frozen before you never got to make.