The Weight of an Open Wound
The dirt was cold. Not the cold of autumn, not the cold of high mountain nights. It was the cold of a grave that had been waiting for me longer than I had known I was walking toward it.
I pressed my palm flat against the soil and pushed. My arm shook. The wound in my side made a sound I will never forget — a wet, sucking tear that reminded me I was still meat. Still breakable. Still human.
And somewhere out there, something was waiting to prove how temporary that condition really was.
I don’t know how long I lay there, staring at a sky that had forgotten where the stars went. Time moves differently when you’re bleeding. Each second stretches into a corridor you can’t see the end of. Each breath becomes a negotiation — stay, just stay a little longer, we’re not done yet.
But that’s the thing about wounds. They don’t care about negotiations. They don’t care about the people you left behind, or the promises you made, or the fact that you were supposed to be the one who held things together. They just open. And open. And let the world drain out of you one drop at a time.
I remember thinking, this is how it ends. Not with fire. Not with a swarm. Just cold and dark and a hole I didn’t put there.
And then I remembered her face.
Not Tamara’s. Not yet. Someone else. Someone who had believed in me before I had given her any reason to. Someone who had looked at a broken man lying in a hospital bed and decided he was worth saving.
I couldn’t remember her name in that moment. The blood loss had stolen it. But I remembered her eyes. I remembered the weight of her hand in mine. I remembered that she had seen something in me that I had spent years trying to bury.
She would not have wanted me to die in the dirt.
So I got up.
Getting up was not graceful. Getting up was a conversation with agony. My ribs screamed. My side wept. My vision went white at the edges, then black, then settled into a grey that was just enough to see the trees by. I used a fallen branch as a crutch. I used curses as fuel. I used the memory of that woman’s face as a map I didn’t know how to read.
The camp was gone. I don’t mean abandoned. I mean erased. The fire pit was cold and scattered, as if someone had kicked it apart with deliberate care. The bedrolls were missing — not folded, not packed, just gone. The tarp that had sheltered us from the rain was still there, but it lay flat on the ground, empty, like a shed skin.
I found Joshua’s boot prints leading into the treeline. I found Sarah’s scarf caught on a low branch. I found the spot where Moretti had been sitting — the ground was smooth, undisturbed, as if he had simply risen and walked away without leaving a trace.
But he wouldn’t have left his notebook.
And the notebook was there. Open. Face-down in the dirt.
I bent to pick it up. The wound screamed. I ignored it. The notebook was damp, the pages swollen with moisture, but the ink was still legible. Moretti’s handwriting was small, precise, the handwriting of a man who believed that order could save him. The page was covered in symbols I didn’t recognize — not code, not language, something older. Something that looked like it had been written by a hand that was not entirely Moretti’s.
At the bottom of the page, in English, he had written three words:
It was here.
I didn’t need to ask what it meant.
I had felt it. In the dream that wasn’t a dream. In the moment between sleeping and waking, when the camp had been real and then it wasn’t. I had felt something press against the edges of my mind — not a thought, not a sound, but a presence, vast and cold and hungry in a way that had nothing to do with food.
Luzige had been here.
And he had taken them.
The question was: why had he left me?
I stood there in the dark, holding Moretti’s notebook, bleeding into the dirt, and I asked myself that question over and over. Why me? Why not take me with the others? Why leave a wounded man alone in the wilderness with nothing but a mystery and a wound that was slowly killing him?
I didn’t have an answer. But I had a feeling. And the feeling was a cold knot in my chest that had nothing to do with the temperature.
He left me because he wanted me to follow.
He left me because he wanted me to find him.
And I was going to oblige.
The walk took hours. I don’t remember all of it. I remember the trees thinning, the ground sloping upward, the way the cold air bit into my lungs until I couldn’t tell if I was breathing or drowning. I remember stopping to rest against a boulder and finding that my legs wouldn’t hold me anymore. I remember sitting down, just for a moment, and feeling the world tilt sideways.
I must have slept. Or passed out. The line between them had blurred into something meaningless.
When I opened my eyes, the sky was grey — not the grey of clouds, the grey of dawn. The sun was coming up somewhere behind the mountains, but the light it cast was thin and weak, as if it too was bleeding.
And there, in the distance, I saw it.
A wall.
Not a fence. Not a barricade. A wall. Stone, tall, smooth, unbroken. It rose out of the treeline like a tooth that had grown through the earth, and it was covered in symbols that glowed faintly in the dawn light — the same symbols from Moretti’s notebook, the same symbols I had seen in my dreams.
A compound. Someone had built a compound out here, in the middle of nowhere, hidden from the world behind a wall that looked like it had been standing for centuries.
It didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense anymore. But the wall was real, and the wall was shelter, and the wall might have answers.
Or it might have worse.
I started walking. My legs moved. My wound bled. My mind kept circling back to the same thought, over and over, like a prayer I didn’t know the words to:
They’re in there. Somewhere. And I’m going to find them.
But as I got closer, as the wall grew taller and the symbols brighter, I began to notice the details I had missed from a distance. The way the stones didn’t quite fit together. The way the symbols seemed to move when I wasn’t looking directly at them. The way the air around the compound felt wrong — not cold, not hot, but empty, as if something had been removed from it and never put back.
The wall was not a barrier. It was a seal.
And whatever it was sealing in, or sealing out, I was about to find out.
I stopped at the base of the wall. The stone was warm to the touch. Not hot. Warm. Like skin. Like something alive was breathing on the other side.
I pressed my palm against it.
And the wall opened.
Not a door. Not a gate. The stone itself parted, like water, like flesh, like something that had been waiting for permission to let me in. The opening was dark. The air that came through smelled of earth and iron and something else — something sweet, cloying, almost floral.
I stood at the threshold, one hand pressed to my bleeding side, the other holding Moretti’s notebook, and I made a choice.
I walked in.
The darkness swallowed me. The wall closed behind me. And I was somewhere else entirely.
That’s where this story begins — not with the wound, not with the loss, not with the hunger that followed me through the dark. It begins with a choice I made in a moment when I had nothing left but the conviction that the people I loved were still alive, and that I would find them, even if it meant walking into a place that had never intended to let me leave.
This is just one moment from Seventh Journey Book 3. If you want to experience the full story, it’s available on Amazon.
📚 The Seventh Journey Trilogy
- Book 1: amazon.com/dp/B079581Q4G
- Book 2: amazon.com/dp/B0792HGC35
- Book 3: amazon.com/dp/B0H5T4VP81