Elías descended using a rope made of braided leather. The silence was the worst part. No birds, no insects, not even the buzz of a fly. Just the soft crunch of his boots on the black sand.

He looked alive. That was the horror of it. Ten years lost, and his brother looked exactly as he had the day he left. The same warm brown eyes, the same cleft chin. He wore the same canvas jacket. He was even smiling.

“Eli,” Mateo said. His voice was the hum made flesh. “You came. I knew you would. You always were the loyal one.”

Elías drew his revolver. The metal felt cold and childish. He pushed the cabin door open with his shoulder.

“The savagery of this land is not in its beasts, Eli,” the creature said, rising from the chair. As it stood, its shadow stretched not behind it, but forward , swallowing the light from Elías’s lantern. “It is in its silence. In its patience. I have been here for ten years, wearing your brother’s skin, learning his voice, his memories, his love for you. I did not kill him. I digested him. Slowly. And I saved the taste of your name for last.”

“You don’t belong here,” Elías said, holding up the stone. “You are not the land. You are a parasite. And a parasite has no name.”

He spoke the true name of the thing. He had learned it from the dying whispers of the old priests, a word that felt like swallowing glass. The sound was not Spanish, not any human tongue. It was the sound of a bone snapping.

He adjusted the strap of his worn leather satchel, the one that still held his brother’s compass. The needle no longer pointed north. Here, deep in the savage lands beyond the Sierra de los Muertos, it spun in lazy, useless circles, pointing only to the tremble in Elías’s hand.

The wind didn’t howl in the Gran Páramo. It screamed . It was a dry, ancient sound that carried the dust of bones and the ghosts of failed expeditions. Elías Montalvo knew this sound. He’d heard it in his nightmares for ten years.

He wasn’t a geographer anymore. The university in the capital had stripped his title after his first expedition returned with only half its men and a story too impossible to believe. “Giant felines that walk like men? Forests that move overnight? You are a liar, Montalvo, or a madman.”

The thing wearing Mateo’s face stopped smiling. The hum grew louder, and the walls of the cabin began to breathe . The wood pulsed. The charts curled. The moonlight from the crack in the hull turned a sickly amber.

Elías’s hand trembled. The truth was a cold stone in his gut. He had crossed all that savage land not for hope, but for an ending. He needed to see the body. He needed to bury the guilt.