Between Breaths

Darkness didn’t come all at once.

It pressed in slowly, like something heavy lowering over her face, muffling the world piece by piece. Louise lay where she had fallen, her body twisted awkwardly against the roots and damp earth, blood pooling beneath her in a thick, sticky warmth that no longer felt entirely like her own.

Her chest rose—barely.

Air scraped into her lungs in shallow, uneven pulls, each breath thinner than the last. The cold had settled into her bones, creeping inward from the ground beneath her, numbing her fingers first, then her arms, then deeper still.

She tried to move.

Nothing responded.

Not her hands, not her legs—not even her voice. Somewhere inside her, a command formed, desperate and sharp: get up. But it never reached her body. It dissolved before it could become action, swallowed by the growing quiet.

Sound came and went in strange, broken pieces.

The wind through the trees—too distant.

Leaves shifting—too loud, then gone entirely.

Her own heartbeat—irregular, dragging, then suddenly pounding so hard it echoed painfully in her ears before fading again.

Time didn’t feel like time anymore. It stretched, folded, collapsed in on itself. Seconds might have been minutes. Minutes might have already passed into something else entirely.

Pain flickered.

Not constant—not sharp anymore. Just pulses. Dull. Distant. Like something far away trying to remind her it was still there. The tearing, the biting, the weight of him—it all blurred together, slipping out of reach.

Aaron.

The thought surfaced weakly, like something rising through thick water. For a moment, she saw his face—not the thing in the forest, not the teeth—but his face, the one she had learned to read, to survive around. Then even that began to dissolve, losing shape, losing meaning.

Her breathing stuttered.

Stopped.

Then forced itself back again in a shallow gasp that scraped her throat raw.

Something in her chest tightened—not pain, not quite. Something else. A resistance. Like her body had reached a point where it should stop… and didn’t.

It held.

Barely—but it held.

The cold should have taken her completely by now. The blood loss should have dragged her under. Everything in her knew that. Everything in her body was failing in the exact way it was supposed to.

And yet—

Her heart beat again.

Slow. Weak. But there.

Another breath followed, thin and uneven, catching halfway through before forcing its way deeper.

Something was wrong.

Or maybe—something was refusing.

The darkness thickened at the edges of her vision, pressing in harder now, narrowing everything down to nothing but sensation—cold, weight, the faint rhythm of something inside her that would not stop.

Then—

A sound.

At first, it slipped past her, just another fragment in the broken noise of the forest. But it came again, clearer this time.

Not wind.

Not movement.

Voices.

Low.

Close.

Not panicked. Not rushed. Controlled.

Real.

Louise’s breath hitched weakly, her body unable to react, but something in her mind—some last fragile thread—clung to the sound.

They were coming closer.

And they were not afraid.