The Resonance Map

The first anomaly wasn’t in the forest.

It was in the archives.

Buried beneath routine expedition reports—wrapped in mislabeled folders and scrubbed metadata—Lyra found a map.

Its paper was aged, but the ink was wrong.

Too sharp. Too recent.

Too deliberate for a dead project.

The terrain it charted was familiar: the outer ridges near Grief Hollow.

But layered atop it were glyphs.

Resonance notations in a format she’d never seen, pulsing faintly when scanned—like the ink had memory.

Someone had tried to map the Hollow.

Not the forest. The pulse inside it.

Lyra isolated the glyphs, decoding their pattern through half-forgotten fringe theories on layered spatial distortion.

It wasn’t a map of geography.

It was a map of bleed—where reality had begun to warp and fold in on itself.

And whoever made it had been close.

Too close.

The last note in the corner was unsigned, but it read:

> “If this chart is ever found, tell them it moved. It’s not bound to trees. It’s not inside the Hollow. It is the Hollow.”

She copied every line by hand.

Her scanner flickered. Her fingers shook.

The ink was still warm.