Field Report – Journal Entry 17
The forest remained unnervingly silent this morning. No birds. No wind. Just the sound of boots against the gravel path and the occasional creak of gear shifting on our backs. Morales kept checking her watch, even though none of us could get a signal here.
The structure we discovered yesterday is older than we thought — carved stone, wrapped in moss, seemingly untouched for decades. Marks on the walls suggest a pattern or sequence, but no one can decipher them yet.
I found something strange near the northern edge. Looked like a message hastily scratched into the bark of an elm tree. At first I thought it was gibberish, but it read almost like a phrase:
Bru pdb rshq brxu hbhv
I copied it down quickly, though its meaning escapes me. Maybe it’s a cipher, or just someone’s idea of a joke. The letters seem deliberate.
Tonight, we’ll camp closer to the ruins. Stevens says he heard whispering when he went to collect firewood. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m not taking chances. We’ll rotate watches. If anything moves out there, we’ll see it.
Or maybe… it’ll see us first.