Mason
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
The old carving underneath was still faintly visible, like the original had been scraped and then covered.
Mason stopped and stared at it longer than he needed to.
"'Maybe they replaced it,' I said.
"'With what?'
he said, and his tone was flat."
We checked the map.
We checked the compass.
The terrain matched what we expected.
The left branch made sense.
We took it.
We walked on.
An hour later we found a second post.
This one wasn't at a major junction, just a minor fork where the trail skirted a marshy spot and rejoined.
The post had no official signboard at all.
Instead, there was a strip of bark nailed to it with something scratched into the bark.
Not carved cleanly,
scratched like someone had used a nail or a knife tip and pressed too hard.
It looked like a symbol more than letters, a few lines intersecting, then a circle, then another set of lines.
No arrow, no direction.
Mason looked at me.