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Chapter Eight A:
Statues with hollow eyes seem to shift positions. A crew member disappears. Night falls—and the island feels alive.
The jungle fell into an eerie hush, the kind that made the skin prickle with instinct. Kairo clutched the brittle notebook they had discovered—half-buried beneath moss and roots. The pages were water-stained, but the scrawls of the previous crew still bled through like whispers on parchment.
> "They're always watching. The statues… they move when we sleep."
Juno, the botanist, froze in place.
"Do you see that?" she asked in a hoarse whisper.
They all turned.
It stood just beyond the thicket—a weathered statue, humanoid, towering yet hunched. Its eyes were hollow, wide, and facing them directly. The surface was cracked like sun-dried clay, covered in thin vines that moved ever so slightly with the wind—or something else.
"I swear," muttered Aidan, "that thing wasn't there before."
Kairo took a cautious step closer, heart pounding. "It wasn't."
They moved past it slowly, but as they advanced deeper into the jungle, more appeared—sometimes alone, sometimes in clusters. All carved from the same porous stone, all staring. Their postures were always different, slightly turned, slightly shifted… like they were caught mid-step.
By sundown, the path had twisted into a labyrinth of stone. The crew's makeshift camp flickered with weak lantern light, and shadows danced wildly across the canopy above. Aidan volunteered for first watch. He sat silently beside the fire, eyes fixed on a lone statue nearby—tall, slender, almost faceless. Its head tilted slightly in the orange glow.
The rest drifted to uneasy sleep.
Then came the scream.
It ripped through the stillness, raw and primal. Kairo scrambled out of his tent—Juno already awake, clutching a flashlight. But Aidan was gone.
Only the faint glow of his lantern remained—lying tipped over, still flickering weakly in the dirt.
In his place stood a new statue.
It was small… human-sized… with a look of horror frozen into its features.
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