The first thing was the smell.

  Not the sharp synthetic sweetness of Maxwell's frat house — not beer-soaked carpet and Axe body spray and someone's half-eaten pizza — but something older. Rot and iron and a particular wet heaviness that reached into Josh's nose and sat there. He tried to place it. Couldn't. His brain kept returning a loading error.

  He opened his eyes.

  Sky. Actual sky, not a ceiling — pale and enormous and wrong somehow, its blue too vivid, as if someone had pushed the saturation up two stops. He watched a hawk trace a wide circle above him and felt, for a long and peaceful moment, nothing at all.

  Then his wrists moved and didn't.

  He tried again. His hands lifted maybe three inches before something bit into his skin — rough iron, two thick rings — and pulled him back down. He turned his head and saw the chain. Followed it to a post. Followed the post down to weathered planks. Understood slowly, as if from a great distance, that he was lying on a raised wooden platform like a market display, his arms pinned above him, his back on hard boards.

  He sat up — the chain allowed that much — and the world lurched.

  Mud. Dozens of tents pitched in uneven rows across churned earth. Men in armour moving between them, talking, sharpening things, carrying things. A cookfire somewhere close. The smell of horses, of unwashed bodies, of smoke. A pennant on a tall pole snapping in the wind — a blue falcon on white — and around the whole sprawling encampment, on every side, trees: enormous pines standing so close together their canopy swallowed the horizon.

  Josh stared.

  His first coherent thought was: Maxwell did this.

  His second thought arrived slower and felt much heavier: Maxwell did not do this.

  — ? —

  He tried to reconstruct the last thing he remembered.

  The party. Third floor of Delta Sig, speakers running some mid playlist, red cups everywhere. He'd taken an Adderall — two Adderall — and someone had handed him something else he hadn't asked what it was. After that the memories went photographic: a flash of the roof, the guttering, the backyard pool glittering thirty feet below. Rope in his hands. The incredible weightless logic of a person who has decided to stop thinking.

  And then nothing. And then this.

  He tested the chain again. Iron. Old. Real. The platform under him was real — he could feel splinters threatening his palms, feel the October-cold air on his face. He pressed a thumb into the meat of his hand until it went white, then pink. He was not dreaming. Dreaming never hurt like that.

  He thought: okay.

  He thought: what is happening to me.

  And then — without warning, without anything he could call an invitation — something opened inside his head.

  — ? —

  The closest thing he could compare it to was watching a movie he'd already seen. The knowledge was just there, suddenly, complete and specific and not his: he was Kaelen. A bastard by birth, father unknown, taken in by the Church of the Sacred Flame at age four. He'd spent seven years in a monastery scrubbing floors before a passing nobleman's steward had noticed he was good with horses. He'd spent another three years earning the right to be called a stable boy. His world smelled like this. His hands had calluses in the places Josh's didn't. He knew forty words for horse temperament and nothing — nothing — about anything else.

  Josh sat with this for a moment.

  Then he leaned over the edge of the platform and was sick.

  He retched until there was nothing left, then stayed crouched with his chained wrists taking his weight, breathing carefully. Someone in the camp below noticed and looked up at him with the flat expression of a man watching an unremarkable thing. Then looked away.

  The memories didn't feel like memories. They felt like a second set of furniture in a room that had only ever had one set. Both arrangements real. Both blocking the other. Kaelen's hands knew how to bridle a horse in the dark. Josh's hands knew how to pour a beer without a head. Both of these were true at the same time, and his brain couldn't decide which set of hands he was actually using to grip this chain.

  He threw up again. Nothing came.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  — ? —

  He didn't know how long he sat there before he noticed the man standing at the base of the platform.

  Thin. Hollow-cheeked, with the particular sunken look of a person who has been eating half of what they need for months. He stood with his hands folded in front of him and watched Josh the way a doctor watches a patient whose chart he's already read.

  "The Baron calls for you," the man said. His voice was mournful in a specific way — not sad, but used up.

  He climbed the platform stairs and began to undo the chain without ceremony. Josh watched his own wrists being freed as if they belonged to someone else.

  "Who are you?" Josh asked.

  The man paused. Looked at him with something that took Josh a moment to identify as pity.

  "You'd wish you died," the man said quietly. Then he finished unhooking the chain and walked back down the stairs and didn't look back.

  Josh sat on the edge of the platform, feet dangling. Rubbed his wrists. Watched the camp.

  He needed to think. He needed to think like himself, not like Kaelen, who was apparently the kind of person who accepted being chained to a platform with dull, exhausted obedience. Kaelen's instincts were already rising in him — the reflex to stand, to follow, to keep his eyes down and his mouth shut. He pushed against them, consciously, the way you push against sleep.

  The Baron's tent was visible from here. Blue pennant, two guards at the entrance. And to the east, beyond the camp's edge, where the pine trees pressed close — space. Actual space. The camp had a perimeter but it was loose; the guards faced inward toward their own business. He had a straight run to the tree line, maybe forty yards.

  Kaelen's memories told him this was an insane idea.

  Kaelen's memories told him the forest was not safe, that deserters were executed, that men who ran from the Baron's camp had a way of being brought back in pieces.

  Josh listened to all of this. Then he thought about his hands — about both sets of hands, his and Kaelen's and whichever of them was actually his — and thought: I am not this person. I am not from here. Whatever is happening to me, I am not going to sit in a camp and wait for it to happen.

  He stood up.

  — ? —

  No one watched him cross the camp.

  That was the thing he remembered, after — how unremarkable it was. He walked between tents with his arms at his sides and his eyes forward and not a single person looked at him for more than a moment. He was a stable boy. Stable boys were furniture.

  He reached the camp's eastern edge and kept walking.

  The forest received him. That was the word for it — received, the way a cold room receives you when you step inside. The light changed, went green and particulate. The ground went soft. The sounds of the camp fell away behind him and were replaced by wind in high branches and, somewhere distant, something moving through underbrush.

  He breathed. In here, at least, the air tasted like something real.

  He moved fast, not quite running, angling away from the camp and into the trees. The further he went the quieter it got. Pine needles underfoot. The occasional crack of a branch that made his heart seize. He kept going.

  He didn't see it until he was almost on top of it.

  — ? —

  The bones had been arranged, not scattered.

  That was the detail that stopped him — not the pile itself, which was large enough that he might have mistaken it for a fallen tree in the green half-light, but the care of it. The architecture. Smaller bones at the base, radiating outward like roots. Larger ones stacked inward, an ascending structure, deliberate. And at the crown of it — perhaps six feet off the ground, tilted forward at exactly the angle a head tilts when it's watching you — a deer skull.

  The antlers were enormous. Six-pointed on each side. They spread wider than Josh's arm span, wider than seemed physically possible for any deer he'd ever seen, and they curved at the tips in a direction antlers didn't curve. He stood twelve feet away from it and couldn't look at it directly — not because it was too bright but because his eyes kept sliding off it, kept trying to find somewhere else to land.

  He should walk around it. Obviously. He should walk around it and keep moving.

  He looked at the skull.

  The skull looked at him.

  The forest went quiet. Not the ordinary quiet of an empty wood — everything at once, simultaneously, as if someone had reached into the world and turned down a dial. No wind. No distant movement. The sound of his own breathing, his own heartbeat, and nothing else.

  The antlers filled his vision.

  He tried to look away.

  He could not look away.

  The pressure arrived gradually, the way cold does when you've been standing in it long enough — not an attack, exactly, more like a weight settling over his thoughts. Something behind the skull. Something that found the gap between Josh and Kaelen, slid itself in, and began, very carefully, to make itself at home.

  His legs moved. He wasn't moving his legs.

  He walked toward the skull. He watched himself walk toward the skull. He thought, very clearly, in a voice that was still his: stop. He thought: stop. He thought: please stop.

  His legs carried him three more steps.

  The antlers were the last thing he saw.

  — ? —

  ——————————————————————————————————

  ◆ SYSTEM NOTIFICATION ◆

  ——————————————————————————————————

  Requirements to unlock the Time Loop System: complete.

  Level 0

  Death count: 1

  Way of death: Your mind was taken by the Cult of the Wild.

  Would you like to learn the skill [Resistance to Mind Enslavement]?

  ——————————————————————————————————