 October 13th. For those of you who may one day find my journal, clutch safely in my back once my bones are one with the vines, I would let you know that mine was not a disease of self-affliction, but rather one of humanity. My sickness, that of every human that has ever walked this wild and forbidden place, I had wanted to know the very reasons for the universe, so as foolishly as any man might stumble I found the library, and I believed in those times that no story could tell the edges of the world, but not even the God's eyes shown on it. But then I cleaned off my desk at the end of a semester and a card made of old yellowed fiber fell from the stack of papers. The writing on it was ancient and seemed written in a dead language from a man possessed, but I showed it to my closest friends and together we split the atom of sanity and were burned in its light. And standing in that place I asked for answers. I asked for the death of my mind when all was disproven and I received it from a creature that made belief itself irrational. A book, bound in damaged leather, tied with cord, the one which as of now is locked in a metal chest in my cabin's closet. I fear this book falling into the hands of anyone else. Those of Reddit have all gone on to places where the maps are the same at any angle. And as I fear I may now have been ensnared as they were. The book was written in English, yet no men could have written it. I spent days feverishly reading it. The darkness and light burned me away until I was a part of it. Crushed into singularity with the universe. Spoke of primordial gods created from the chaos of the universe. How they'd crashed into the natural earth to form the entity that would create mankind. A convoluted mecanica of progress and decay while the deep, cool earth slept and gathered the knowledge lost by mankind. It spoke to me of the trees, of the sun, of revelry and verdant praise, of light and power, of a quiet love from afar for all mankind. Spoke of the universe and the universe beyond and beyond that. The hinterland had captured me. It captured me and it pulled me here and here I now stand and I'm unable to find a way back to the point I started. So I find my knowledge of the world is now smoke. October 14th. If one finds themselves lost in a forest or finds themselves free from direction, the best advice would be to wait and let someone find you before you wander even further. But not only do I believe that it is now pointless, I feel as though I can't. But waiting would cause the world to pull out from under me and I may fall into a formless abyss. I have chosen to walk the path, chance the universe, roll its dice with my footsteps. Considering I have been entrapped by the same gods that have already gotten the others, I think there is little use in thrashing, save to make the venom take me faster. October 15th. As a child, I once wandered the area around my home, looking in awe as the world changed with time and I changed along with it. Leaves turned. The air grew cold and still. As I grew taller than did the surrounding trees, I'd often wonder if mankind formed as the earth cooled from its initial form of hellfire and hydrogen gas. Were we made by gods or as the forest told me, did we rise from dirt and moss, ice made of fresh spring water and souls made of wood and branches that longed to stretch to the sky. Binds grow and overtake and things fall to ruin, as do we as humans. Some ruin from disease, some from poison, some are cut down before their fingertips can touch the sky and know the air. In a way these trees near immortal shrines to nothing have surpassed us in every way and they have more meaning than we do, a quiet purpose and they seem to radiate emotions that have no names. Then again, names are things made by man in an attempt to understand the worlds they lock themselves into. October 16th. I keep believing it was supposed to have snowed last night. I remember in my cabin hearing from the ranger station that a snowstorm was coming from the north, coming down from Washington with a fury and that's why I had entered the forest in the first place. Together, I nod for the fire, though I only have a bottle of water. There has been no complaint from my body, no hunger. I didn't notice it first. I've never been one for indulgence but this seems almost unnatural. I have no real desire to think on it. I choose simply to take this divine energy and keep walking. October 17th. When I was 14, I had become an untamed, monstrous thing. Quick of wit and sinister in design. My father's drunkenness had come to be a disease that would surely end him and he infected me with zanger by brutal contact. The childish dreams of the forest had abandoned me then. Maybe I just stopped hearing its call. I was after all just a boy in the dangerous 70s when war was far away feared which I believe also poisoned me and perhaps the forest was a mark of my innocent adolescence. Something to eventually be discarded. The Vietnam War took many things from all of us back then, for some it took parents, for some it took much more. Some fathers came back from the war marbled and wrong. They tried to fill themselves with alcohol and desperation to remember the person they used to be. Unlike other gods, those of war do not care what they take as means to their ends. Some of their blessed came back with a thirst for fermented grain and eventually turned to a ravenous hunger for lead. Gods of war do not care for those youths they leave in their wake. October 18th. I believe I am right. I believe I have walked east. The forest has gone from autumn to winter and I feel almost renewed as if the ancient nameless gods of this forest have given me strength. I watch the sun begin to set and I find my place in a warm bed of pine and hemlock branches. Some time walking today I had forgotten about my search for civilization. Did I even have a purpose in my cabin with my books and candles, with my writing, the diaries? I feel as if it's all so deliberate, almost artificial. I begin to wonder if this forest is beginning to try and take me to make me into a tree to grow into the sky I once dreamed of. To bask in the sun and sleep in the cold and would that be so terrible? That be the end of me of the reward for having braved the trials of life? Did the ancient Greeks understand the words spoken to them by the gods? Could they hear the gods' words and the crashing of the waves on the sandy shore or the crackle of a fire or the clap of thunder? What power did they have to hear their words and what would those gods say now? The wind blows through the trees as dark falls and I think I can hear them. The gods are whispering to me in words so ancient that humans cannot speak them. Words humans have lost the meaning of. Unexplicable, far off fear sets into me as I look around at those nameless monuments. Is it the ancient gods of dirt and root walking around me? And what do they wish to communicate? October 19th. Mist had rolled in during the night, overtaking everything in a mind-warping sea of fog. And against my better judgment I tried to walk onward but I fell and rolled down a slope, bending myself like a nail on the side of a tree that grew resiliently on this treacherous slope. I've laid here in the bottom as I tried to recover myself and it's now noon. This is, I believe, the seventh day I have been walking in these wilds and against all reason. I have survived. The gods of this primordial earth have taken a liking to me I think and perhaps I did something they liked. Perhaps this is the afterlife or the way to it. I wonder then how I might have died. Perhaps frozen on that first night. I mean I'm sure I had been alive on the first day. Though this would normally terrify any man I feel a slight comfort from it. I've looked to these trails and darkness and found happiness, contentment, wonder, emotions man has no name for nor explanation. October 20th. As a young man I strode through the bleak existence of manhood living as humans do in a world with no sun shivering under the coldness of that confinement and wishing for my life to end. Having no family meant nothing to hold me down and I spent my childhood going between homes. Through the muddy paths of chemical obsession and sleeping under rainy skies I became tempered against the hardness and harshness of the world. Having no love made me immune to the knife of a rogue and the hunger of loneliness. I had been stripped to nothing. It was one night when the sirens were closing in on me and I was fleeing certain imprisonment that I came upon a cliff and a solitary trail and I fled there climbing higher and higher escaping the fog of the combustion engines and the chemicals that held my brain prisoner. I found a cave on the cliff once a line through which goods were moved by rail before the interstates and highways became commonplace and I sheltered here as a storm came down. My pursuers gave up when I couldn't be found and here I came down with a sickness unlike any other I've ever experienced. In sickness I lay against the wall of the cave my mind spinning until it came to rest and I saw the sun and I felt warm earth beneath my body and the sun dabbled down from the boughs of trees. I achieved a sort of awareness brought on in the escape from my self-inflicted disease. Half mad half dead I crawled out of the cave. I was desperate to see something I did not understand. I crawled on rocky soil and tore my body to pieces to reach the top of the cliff and when I did the sky opened up and I was stripped from my body by what I saw. A great flash of light in the heavens spiraled out before me in the night limitless and bright and I became man again more than a man under earth and sky and the chemical addiction was torn out of my brain like a parasite. I was filled with stars and planets and I was made whole again by the universe and after this I found myself with new clarity and purpose though I hadn't had purpose before and after this I found myself with new clarity and purpose I was certain that the path forward was before me and I took it October 21st. The path is now gone lost a vine and root and trume and rot and I have simply trekked the strange trail that seems to jump out at me from between the trees but I'm now lost in an ancient valley that shows no sign of ever having known human life it is pure and untouched in the way that you can look up and be confused for lack of a sky beyond the boughs. It's dark here but I am ever hopeful. I have found plenty to drink to the will of the ancient gods that watch me. Hope is a strange thing in this forest for one would be where I am and curl up and give up but I have chosen to look up into the sun I have chosen to look to the path ahead and see something more waiting. To walk this path is to leave the past behind. To keep walking the path of life one must learn to leave memories in the pages before them to leave the pain in those pages. We do not carry those pages with us in our heart where they cover the sun above. You can go back and read learn from the pages of your past but never carry them in your hands. Leave your hands free to write a better path ahead. Sometimes when you live in a world with no light as I have you have to climb and break the fog to see the sky again. October 22nd this valley seems to stretch on forever in a great maw that appears to be open to anything that might fall in. I have tried to find my way back out of it but the walls have come in on me and the top of the gorge I have tumbled into seems fenced with trees as the sun rose to its high peak I have found what I believe is the end of this veritable ravine but it has come to a cave that I am loathed to enter no matter what the gods may say to me I will sit for the rest of the day and rest hopefully the trees will speak to me an answer. At noon I decided to make a descension into the roots and unknown into a grave into freedom into heaven hell as much as I loathed to lose the sky this is the only way forward like life sometimes the only way forward is through the deep I have descended into the mouth of a god and found myself among its truest meaning the darkness has served to strip me of my humanity and create a soul out of me a ghost of what I once was a ghost of light trees dirt moss a black figure a shadow truth in the midst of the lie a reality I've become Dante chosen to plunge into the deepest bowels of the earth my flashlight my dearest Virgil to take me to hell and back out again learned of a man's purpose and its inherent disease given to it as soon as it first looked to the sun mankind is an entity unique in itself born with the ability to sense and feel to receive answers from the universe and to perceive with their mind but through a quirk in our culture we are brought up to reject that ability as useless as a heresy is evil as a child I heard the storms speak to me in ancient languages too old to understand and I heard those forgotten names but I know them now I know them as if they were a part of me part of all existence all children of man can hear these gods before their force discard them in favor of bread and wine or whatever mankind chooses to use as the tool to shut down the beauty of man but some still cannot resist that call and they come back the forest calls them maybe the lightning streaking across the sky maybe the roots of mankind itself in that primal glory but something calls them back and they desire nothing more than to bury themselves in the dirt and be reborn again as a child to hear them clearly say again with the true voices of the universe and I am standing at what I am certain is the end of everything all that waits me as a single chamber with a bottomless well and I cannot go back I have tried to sleep but it seems all in avoidance of the inevitable fact that I have arrived at my end I can only record my thoughts here before I make my descent into space and stars before I take the last steps of this journey and begin a new one I have considered trying to turn back but seeing as I have wandered for so long in this cave really is no choice this is my final letter in this book of memory I will tuck it into my coat and take my silent goodbye with me into hell I will dine with demons God knows I deserve it from all that I've done in my life I'm sorry Isabel I'm sorry Richard I'm sorry most to you my precious Annalise we wanted to know what man should never know we wanted answers to questions we shouldn't even have been able to ask the university will know me as William Hinsley professor of literature and a scholar of ancient gods but I will go down into hell as just a man who made countless mistakes and misjudgments I only asked the gods who whispered to me long ago give me some sort of mercy