You wake in a ring of standing stones, wrists bound, head pounding, surrounded by four strangers who share your terror—and your fractured memory of a kind local and a drink that tasted wrong.

Figures emerge from the tree line. Wooden masks—elk, wolf, owl—carved with impossible age. Torches. Axes. Sickles. An elder explains, with what sounds like genuine sorrow, that the soil must be fed before winter. The old compact demands outsiders.

The rules are simple: reach the highway beyond the northern ridge before dawn, and you go free. Eight miles through October forest. Six hours until sunrise.

No one has ever reached the highway.

The hunters don't run. They walk. They know the forest will deliver the prey.

Something ancient dwells in Harrow Valley—in the soil, the roots, the bedrock. The founders made an arrangement 280 years ago: prosperity in exchange for tribute. The forest within the ritual boundaries serves that bargain. Paths loop back on themselves. Streams reverse their flow. Fog rises thick and sudden when the highway lights seem close. The land does not want to lose what it has been promised.

Four strangers run beside you through the dark:

A former soldier whose capture feels too deliberate, who moves like he was expecting this. An anthropologist who knows more about the compact than she's admitted—theories that might save you or get everyone killed. A trust fund dropout the forest seems to respond to differently, though he has no idea why. A traveling nurse haunted by dreams that led her here against her will, summoned by something she doesn't understand.

Each carries secrets. Each must decide what to share and what to hide. Trust is essential for survival—and potentially fatal if misplaced. Under impossible pressure, the group will fracture, reform, betray, and sacrifice. Not everyone will see sunrise. The question is whether anyone will.

The October canopy is bare. Dry leaves announce every footstep. The temperature drops toward hypothermia. Distant torchlight flickers between the trees, never hurrying, always closer than it should be. The horn sounds again—not behind you anymore, but ahead.

The northern ridge waits somewhere in the darkness. Beyond it, the highway. The normal world. Headlights visible from high ground, proof that escape exists.

If the forest lets you reach it. If your companions don't slow you down. If you can outrun something that has never needed to chase.

The valley provides. The valley requires.

Dawn is six hours away.