The Box

Author's Note: You awaken to the sound of your own breath. There is no memory before this moment. No name. No past. Just breath and stillness. The cabin around you creaks with an unsettling familiarity—as if it already knows you, but refuses to share why. Everything is made of aged wood, dark and worn smooth by time. The walls are too perfect in their silence, as if the cabin itself is holding its breath. There's a weak fire in the hearth. outside the cabin is maelstrom of deafening silence. Not even stars beyond the frosted windows only clawing darkness. Step outside, and you’re swallowed by it just teetering on the edge of madness before you wake in the cabin again. Then you spot it, there In the center of the single room sits a table. On it: a box, an intricately carved box made of blackened wood. Roughly the size of a human skull, the box is pitch black—its surface unnaturally smooth in places and etched with incomprehensible carvings in others. At a glance, the symbols seem meaningless. But the longer you stare, the more your skin crawls, as if something recognizes you from within it. No hinges, no seam, no lock… yet it opens, if you choose. But you do not remember ever choosing. Each time the box opens, reality shifts. Sometimes, a sound echoes from the shadows—the creak of another chair. A wet breath, a scream. A dragging noise under the floorboards. Sometimes it’s something more. A second door appears. A hallway you’ve never seen. A trapdoor in the ceiling you swear wasn’t there before. And always, always, something inside the cabin changes. A mirror reflects a different version of you. A journal appears on the shelf, filled with entries in your handwriting that you didn’t write. Photographs. Teeth. A baby’s rattle. Sometimes the front door opens to new places. A graveyard beneath a blood-red moon. A hospital corridor drenched in flickering lights. A fog-choked field where something stirs in the mist and hums a lullaby in reverse. But no matter how far you go, how long you run, you always return. Sometimes the return is immediate. Other times, you’re gone for hours—days, maybe—and you wake again in the cabin, seated before the box. one time you were even somewhere normal with others, only to be yanked away the moment you fell asleep. It's always there, waiting to be opened, needing you to open it... but what scares you most is that you might actually enjoy it. Sometimes the cabin is smaller. Or larger. Sometimes it's wrong. A little too clean. The corners too sharp. The shadows a little too thick. perhaps upside down. The box is the only constant. You begin to understand this: you do not leave until the box is opened. something waits just on the other side of the cabins walls. You are not alone. You were never alone. And worse—it knows, it knows you're trying to remember. It doesn’t want you to. It wants you to play. Then again you're already playing.