The traveler stepped into the highway rest stop, the heavy glass door hissing shut with a sound like a final breath. The air inside was unnaturally cold, thick with the cloying scent of crushed pine needles and the metallic tang of wet fur.

Under the buzzing, yellowed fluorescent lights of the corridor, the man paused. He looked into the wall-length mirror above the sinks, but his reflection was wrong. Behind his own pale face, the tiled wall had vanished, replaced by a dense, silver-black thicket of birch trees. When he spun around, the door he had just entered through was gone. There was only a narrow hiking trail of grey dirt, stretching into a forest where the trees were spaced with a terrifying, mathematical precision.

He had entered the “Green Room,” the hollow space between the world of asphalt and the deep, ancient wild.

He began to walk, his footsteps silenced by the sterile, white linoleum that was slowly being overtaken by a carpet of black moss. Above, the sky wasn’t visible through the canopy, but a jagged, irregular hole leaked a light so pale it turned his skin the color of a corpse. There was no wind, yet the skeletal branches of the trees swayed in a rhythmic, beckoning motion.

A horn sounded. It was a low, brassy note that vibrated not in the air, but in the marrow of his bones.

The traveler’s pace broke into a frantic jog. He passed a row of rusted park benches, but they were arranged in a tight, inward-facing circle around a pile of bleached white antlers. With every flicker of the overhead lights—which still hung inexplicably from the dark branches above—the pile grew higher. He realized with a jolt of ice in his chest that they weren’t all antlers; some were human ribs, sharpened to needle-like points and polished to a shine.

“Run,” a voice commanded. It wasn’t a vocalization, but the sharp, violent snap of a bowstring against a wrist-guard.

He ran. The trail beneath him softened, turning from dirt into a spongy, heaving texture that felt like treading on a living lung. To his left and right, amber eyes ignited in the shadows. They weren’t attached to heads; they were merely glowing orbs suspended in the dark, moving in perfect, predatory synchronization with his gasping breath.

He never saw the hounds clearly. He caught only the blur of a white flank, the wet gleam of a tooth, and the rhythmic huff-huff-huff of breath that smelled of iron and old snow. They were herding him, nipping at his heels to guide him toward the center of the labyrinth.

He burst into a clearing that resembled an abandoned summer camp from a half-remembered nightmare. The cabins were made of unpeeled logs, their windows dark, vacant sockets. In the center of the camp stood a figure. She was tall, impossibly thin, and draped in a cloak made of living moths that fluttered in a silent, frantic cloud. She held a bow carved from a substance that shimmered like moonlight, and she didn’t look at the traveler. She looked through him, as if he were already a ghost.

The man tried to scream, but his throat had tightened. He looked down at his hands and saw them hardening, the fingers fusing into dark, cloven hooves. His ears lengthened and twitched, catching the sound of his own heart, which now beat with the frantic rhythm of a cornered animal. The liminal space had stripped away his clothes, his name, and his humanity.

The goddess raised the bow. There was no anger in her face, only the clinical satisfaction of a craftswoman seeing a project reach its inevitable conclusion.

The traveler realized then that the forest hadn’t grown around him; he was being woven into it. As the silver arrow left the string, he wasn’t a man escaping a rest stop anymore. He was just another trophy, another branch in her endless, silent architecture of the hunt.