I’m climbing. The snow crunches beneath my boots as if each step awakens the dead sleeping beneath the ice. The wind cuts like razors, but there’s something worse than the cold: the silence. A silence so thick it sticks to your skin, so profound it forces me to listen to my own thoughts as if they weren’t my own. I’ve always loved the mountains, but today… today I feel like the mountain is watching me.

My climbing partner, Lukas, is a few meters behind me, cursing under his breath as he tries to adjust the straps on his backpack. I yell at him to hurry. I don’t know why I’m so restless. Something inside me tells me we should keep moving, but at the same time, every muscle begs me to stop. As if I’m walking toward something I shouldn’t see.

Suddenly, my trekking pole hits something hard under the snow. It’s not a rock. It doesn’t sound like ice. It’s… hollow.

I bend down. I brush away the snow with my glove. What emerges takes my breath away.

A bone.

No, not a bone. A human femur.

I freeze. The air I inhale freezes in my lungs. Lukas approaches, laughing, thinking I’m faking. But when he sees him, the laughter dies in his throat.

“Is it… what I think it is?” she whispers.

I don’t respond. I just begin to remove the snow with my bare hands, ignoring the pain. And little by little, as if the mountain were reluctantly giving us its secret, the complete shape appears.

A skeleton. Sitting. As if it had decided to rest there… and simply never got up.

His clothes are still clinging to his bones, torn but recognizable: a red hiking jacket, green thermal pants. And beside him… a still-intact backpack.

I swallow. Something glistens in the snow. It’s a small braided bracelet, still wrapped around what was once a wrist.

Lukas takes a step back. I can’t.

I kneel before the skeleton as if I were before an altar. I don’t know why, but I feel like I’m not looking at a corpse. I’m looking at a story frozen in time.

I gently pick up the backpack. The zipper creaks when I open it. Inside is a soggy but legible notebook. The first few pages contain supply lists, itineraries, and weather notes. Everything is normal… until I reach the last written page.

A phrase repeated over and over again, as if the person had desperately written it down before their fingers froze.

“I am not alone.”

A chill runs through me, much colder than snow.

“We have to notify the authorities,” Lukas says, his voice shaking.

But I don’t hear him. Something on the ground behind the skeleton catches my attention. There are marks. Footprints. Not boot prints. Not animal prints. Handprints. As if someone—or something—hauled the body here.

But that doesn’t make sense. If he died there by accident, why would there be signs of being dragged?

I get up slowly. I feel someone watching me. Not from a distance. Not from the valley below. From very close.

As if it were right behind me.

—Let’s go, —says Lukas. —Now.

But I can’t move. My gaze is fixed on something else.

There’s something else in the snow. A few feet away. Something small. Pink.

A piece of cloth.

I pick it up. It’s a child’s scarf. With floral embroidery.

It doesn’t belong to the skeleton in front of me.

And then, like a thunderclap passing through my thoughts, I remember something.

Seven years ago, a teenager disappeared in these mountains. Her name was Marlene Vögler . She was seventeen years old. A novice climber who set out alone and never returned.

This body… could be her.

But then, whose scarf is this?

Why are there handprints dragging her? Who—or what—was with her in her final hours?

And the worst part…

Is he still here?

The wind is blowing harder. But it’s not just wind. It’s a whisper.

I don’t understand it at first. But then… I hear clearly.

“Don’t leave me…”

I turn around so fast I almost fall.

There is no one.

But I’m sorry. I know.

We are not alone.