The days that followed were unnervingly quiet.
Too quiet.
The three of them—Emily, Ava, and Marcus—tried to return to their old routines. School. Homework. Avoiding the woods. But the normalcy was a lie, a curtain barely shielding the truth of what they'd seen, of where they had been.
Something had changed.
Not just in the Hollow.
But in them.
The first sign came three days later, when a child disappeared.
Seven-year-old Leah Granger, last seen playing near the old church with a group of neighborhood kids. One minute, she was counting against a tree for a game of hide-and-seek. The next, she was gone. Vanished without a trace.
The police searched. The town prayed.
Emily already knew they wouldn't find her.
"It's starting again," Ava said, standing at Emily's porch in the dying light. "The forest isn't finished with us."
Emily nodded. "The game never ends. It just… moves."
Marcus joined them minutes later, holding his phone out. "Look at this."
On the screen was a grainy video posted to a local forum—one of the kids who'd been playing with Leah had filmed it by accident. The video showed Leah counting with her hands over her eyes, laughing. In the background, something moved among the trees. A tall, dark shape. Watching. Waiting.
Then, distortion. Audio warping. A high-pitched whine.
And silence.
The camera shook, and the video cut out.
Ava's jaw tightened. "It's the same."
Marcus pocketed the phone. "We didn't stop it. We just opened a new round."
Emily looked up at the sky. No clouds. No wind. But the shadows seemed longer than usual. Watching.
"What do we do now?" she asked.
They returned to Devon's journal that night.
Page after page was filled with notes—rituals, symbols, fragmented memories. Most made little sense, but one section stood out now more than ever: The Game Can Expand. It Spreads Through Memory, Through Fear. Through Imitation.
"Imitation," Ava repeated. "Like when kids copy what they see. Stories, rumors…"
"Urban legends," Marcus added. "The more people talk about it, the stronger it becomes."
Emily felt cold. "So just by playing hide-and-seek… they're inviting it in."
"Exactly," Ava said. "They don't even have to know what they're doing. All it needs is the structure. The counting. The hiding. The intention."
Marcus tapped the journal. "And the game's already adapted. It's using us as anchors. We're the only ones who've survived it. That makes us… I don't know. Carriers?"
Emily stood up. "Then we have to find a way to end it for good. Not just for us, but for everyone. Before more kids go missing."
Ava looked skeptical. "You think there is a way?"
"There has to be," Emily insisted. "Devon left us clues. We just haven't read them the right way yet."
They started researching.
For days, they pored over old town records, local myths, anything connected to the forest or the game. What they found disturbed them.
Disappearance patterns dating back over a century. Always children. Always near the woods. Always in spring or autumn—transitional seasons. Times of change.
They discovered a recurring name: The Night Hollow.
In a 1913 article, a local preacher claimed children were being taken by the "Hollow Man," a figure that dwelled in the "shifting dark" beyond the trees. He blamed pagan rituals, claimed a "false god" demanded games in its honor.
Most ignored him.
Two weeks later, the preacher vanished. His daughter, too.
Only his blood-stained Bible was found—open to the page describing the sacrifice of the firstborn.
Then, in the 1960s, a schoolteacher wrote a chilling essay that was never published: "The Laughing Trees." In it, she described students who spoke of dreams where they played a game in the woods—a game where the loser never woke up.
Emily read the last paragraph aloud: "The trees were not alive, but they were not dead either. They remembered. They chose. And they never played fair."
That night, the dreams returned.
Emily found herself standing in the woods again—but this time, the Hollow was gone. Instead, she stood in an unfamiliar clearing, surrounded by children in old-fashioned clothing. Their eyes were black. Their smiles too wide.
In front of them stood a tall figure with a sack over its head, stitched shut at the mouth. It held a rusted lantern in one hand and a whip of tangled branches in the other.
The children began to count.
"One… two… three…"
Emily turned to run, but her feet wouldn't move. The figure lifted the lantern. A beam of sickly yellow light fell over her, and she felt her body beginning to dissolve into shadow.
She woke screaming.
Ava and Marcus had similar dreams.
Each one different.
Each one worse.
And each time, they woke with something missing.
A sliver of memory. A sensation. A sense of self.
It was as if the game was peeling them away, bit by bit.
On the seventh day after Leah's disappearance, they found the mark.
Painted in ash on the side of the elementary school playground: a circle, with three stick figures inside it—one marked with an "X."
The symbol from the Root Heart.
Emily stared at it for a long time. "It's spreading."
Ava nodded. "And the rules are changing."
Just then, a little boy named Trevor walked up behind them. He couldn't have been older than six. He stared at the symbol, then at Emily.
"You're it," he said softly.
Emily's heart skipped. "What?"
He smiled. "You're the seeker now."
Then he walked away.
That night, Emily couldn't sleep.
The words echoed in her head: You're the seeker now.
She sat by her window, watching the trees sway in the distance. Somewhere, a dog barked. Somewhere else, laughter floated on the wind—childlike, but wrong.
She grabbed the journal again, flipping back to the final page. The ink had shifted, curling and warping into new lines of text she hadn't noticed before.
Seeker: Bound by Memory.
Marked by the Hollow.
Round Three Approaches.
Her breath caught as her name slowly faded from the page.
A new name appeared.
Leah.
The little girl.
Emily stood abruptly, knocking the journal to the floor.
"No."
If Leah was the new Seeker…
That meant she wasn't just missing.
She was being used.
The next morning, they returned to the forest.
Not to the gate. Not to the Hollow.
To a new place.
Following the marks, they found a clearing none of them recognized—though it felt eerily familiar.
In the center stood a tree, smaller than the Root Heart, but still unnatural—its bark was smooth, too perfect, and white as bone.
Painted across its surface in a child's handwriting were five words:
You Can't Hide Forever.
Beneath it sat a small stuffed bunny.
Leah's.
Emily picked it up gently, her fingers trembling.
"She's here," she whispered.
The tree groaned.
And the counting began again.