The humidity in the Amazon was a living thing. It pressed against Elara, Maya, and Lira like a second skin, heavy with the smell of wet earth and decay. For seven nights, the same dream had chased them through the sparse canvas of their shared tent at the storm-ravaged refugee camp. Not a chase, exactly. More of a… convergence.
In the dream, the jungle path ahead would wink out of existence, replaced by a towering silhouette—a man-shaped void carved from the deepest part of the night. It had no features, just a smooth, obsidian-black expanse where a face should be, and it moved without sound, its stride eating the distance between them. They would run, their legs turning to molasses, the crack of a breaking branch always the last sound before they woke, hearts hammering against their ribs.
“The same path,” Maya whispered on the morning of the eighth day, her hands trembling as she braided her hair. “The same fallen kapok tree on the left.”
“And the sound,” Lira added, her wide eyes scanning the surrounding green wall. “Always just before we wake.”
Elara, the eldest by minutes, tried to reason. “Stress. Collective trauma from the storm, from helping these people. Our minds are linked.” She fashion a weak smile. “Triplet telepathy.”
But in the jungle, reason was a lantern in a hurricane.
Their work was simple: help the village rebuild huts from the storm’s wreckage. They hauled bamboo, thatched roofs, their bond a rare point of light in a place of profound loss. Yet the jungle watched. The dream-shadow began to seep into their waking hours. Elara would catch a silhouette at the edge of the clearing, identical to the dream, and it would vanish when she blinked. Maya found perfectly circular, impossibly deep indentations in the soft mud by the stream—footprints, but too large, too perfectly formed. Lira started humming an old, forgotten lullaby their grandmother sang, only to find the melody perfectly mimicked by the wind through the leaves, note for haunting note.
The figure was a story in the village, a warning told to children: “Don’t wander alone, or the Sombra will take your path.” A fairy tale to explain the occasional person who vanished into the endless green, never to be seen again. Just another mystery swallowed by the forest.
The first to encounter it face-to-face was Elara.
She was retrieving a forgotten tool from the supply cache at dusk, a shortcut through a thicker stand of trees. The usual jungle chorus fell silent. Then, she saw it. Not a trick of the light. The tall, dark figure stood between two giant ceiba trees, impossibly tall, its form seeming to drink the last of the sunlight. It had no edges; it was a tear in the world. A profound, soul-deep cold radiated from it, not of temperature, but of absence. It didn’t speak. It didn’t need to. Its presence was a sentence. Elara felt the dream-chase’s terror crash over her, a physical force. She didn’t scream. The scream was stolen from her throat, replaced by a dry, rattling gasp. She stumbled back, her world narrowing to that void-faced silhouette, until a root caught her foot and she fell. When she looked up, it was gone. But the cold remained, clinging to her marrow.
She returned to camp a ghost. “It’s real,” she choked out to her sisters, the words tasting of ash. “It’s real and it’s hunting.”
The village elders spoke of appeasement, of leaving small gifts of tobacco and honey at the jungle’s edge. But the Sombra was not a spirit to be bargained with. It was a predator, and it had marked its prey.
Maya, fiercely protective, refused to believe the forest could take her sister. The next day, she ventured to the same shortcut to prove Elara had seen a trick of the light. The silence met her again. The cold. This time, the figure was closer. She could see its outline against the dim green light—tall, impossibly slender, a column of starless night. It raised a hand, or something like a hand, a distortion in the air where a hand should be. Not to strike, but to… point. Toward the deepest, oldest part of the jungle. A directive. A summons.
Maya, stubborn to the last, took a step forward, defiance on her lips. “Why us? What do you want?”
The answer was not in words. It was in the sudden, total collapse of sound. The jungle’s hum ceased. The wind died. Even her own heartbeat seemed to slow. In that profound, impossible silence, she saw its “face.” It wasn’t smooth. It was a whorl of endless, screaming faces—the faces of the generations of the taken, fused together in a silent, eternal scream. The horror wasn’t in a monstrous visage, but in the recognition of all human fear, eternally trapped.
She didn’t run this time. She just stood, and the look on her face froze, a mask of ultimate understanding. When Lira found her hours later, sitting upright against a buttress root, her eyes were open, wide and dry, fixed on nothing. The look of horror was so complete it seemed to have calcified her features. No marks. No signs of struggle. Just a girl who had looked into the abyss and had the abyss look back, and had her soul neatly harvested.
Lira was alone now. The twin anchor to her world was gone. The fear was no longer a dream-chase; it was her constant companion, a cold stone in her gut. She knew where it would happen. The dream had shown her the place—a small, natural clearing where a banyan tree dripped with curtains of moss.
She went not to fight, but to end it. To break the cycle. She took her grandmother’s bone flute, the one she’d been humming unconsciously for days. She walked into the clearing, the air already thickening with that soul-sucking chill.
The Sombra was waiting. It stood beneath the banyan, not moving.
“You took them,” Lira said, her voice a raw whisper. She raised the flute to her lips. “You will not take me. Not like this.”
She played. A song of defiance, of the daughters of the river, of the sun and the rain. A song of life. The notes should have been absurd in that place of absolute silence, but they were sharp, clear, and terrible.
The Sombra did not flinch. It simply… tilted its head. Then, it took a step forward. And another. It moved with a liquid, unstoppable grace. The music didn’t scare it. The music was irrelevant. It was a force of pure, ancient taking.
Lira played on, tears streaming down her face, the final notes of her song swallowed by the advancing void. She saw the whorl of faces, recognized Elara’s and Maya’s among them, their eyes already part of that screaming tapestry. The horror was no longer a future threat. It was the present, filling her, replacing her.
Her body was found two days later by a search party. She lay in the mossy clearing, her flute on her chest, her eyes as wide and glassy as her sisters’. The three of them were brought back to the village, their faces serene in a way that was more horrifying than any expression of pain. No wounds. No signs of poison. Just three perfect, terrifying masks of final, absolute knowledge.
The village elders declared it the work of a jealous forest spirit, a curse for building too close to its heart. They held a swift cremation, their smoke carrying the sisters’ stories into the canopy.
But some of the younger men, who had helped carry the bodies, spoke in hushed tones. They said when they looked into the clearing after loading the girls, they saw the tall, dark figure standing at the jungle’s edge, watching. It seemed taller than before. And for a moment, they heard a sound like a million whispers harmonizing on a single, mournful note—a note that was both a lullaby and a dirge.
The Sombra, the soul-taker, the quiet hunger in the green dark, had its fill. For now. The jungle, ancient and patient, had taken three more paths. And somewhere in its endless, breathing heart, it waited, tall and dark and timeless, for the next lone soul to wander too far from the light.
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