On the other side of the woods, a fifteen-year-old teenager walked with his flashlight. It was dark. The woods were thick, and even though a bright full moon shone overhead, as he made his way deeper into the forest, he could hardly see before him.

Even at this time of night, the forest seemed alive with the sounds of crickets, howls, and deer moving through the bushes. The boy wasn’t easily scared. He had been hunting with his father many times before and camped out in the woods at night. The sound of a few animals was part of the natural fauna of the forest. It was just a matter of not being scared because of the lack of light.

Everything looks much scarier in the shadows. He thought. Your worst fears are usually not as bad as you think in the end.

Besides, animals in the forest were far from his worst fear. His worst fear had already occurred last month, when his best friend, Ardwyn, had gone mysteriously missing in the woods up here in the north.

The family had immediately notified the police, who had called a search party, carefully going through the surrounding area of the house, checking if maybe Ardwyn had gotten into some unfortunate accident in the woods. If he had gotten lost, he couldn’t have gone far, since there were no other marks of civilization out here in the deep woods where Ardwyn’s father lived.

When Ardwyn’s father learned of his son’s disappearance, he phoned his mother, who informed Ardwyn’s friends of what had happened.

Ardwyn didn’t have many friends, and so one of the first few to hear what had happened was him. At first, it seemed incredible enough to get lost in the woods, and just disappear off the face of the earth like that.

For some reason, it really bothered Michael, Ardwyn’s best friend, that not only did Ardwyn move across the country with little warning but then go off and disappear in the woods. The whole affair just didn’t seem right. It was like as if something else had happened to his friend, and everyone around was completely clueless as to his disappearance.

Michael had made the plan to take the trip up north and investigate on his own. He came from a rich family, able to afford the trip easily. Ardwyn always knew Michael was rich, but he never knew exactly how rich. Michael’s family was easily a magnitude wealthier then the already rich families in their neighborhood. If Michael’s father wanted, he could have bought three neighboring houses on each side of their house, naming any price the seller wanted, just not to have any neighbors.

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But Michael’s father always wanted his son to have a relatively normal life, so he sent him off to public school. He also never pushed his son to be as successful as he was, never asking Michael about his homework, or how he was doing at school — never anything like that. As far as his father was concerned, they had enough money to leave to many generations after he was gone. Money was simply of no concern or meaning.

With the empire of wealth that Michael’s father had built up, he was often gone on the weekends, and sometimes on the weekdays, traveling for work in his private jet that could accommodate him at any time of the year. His father’s business holdings were worldwide, across time zones, leaving Michael all alone to basically do what he wanted.

When Michael’s friend, Ardwyn, had gone missing, he flew up north, and booked a hotel by Ardwyn’s house, the closest he could find, which was well over fifty miles away. Michael’s father had gone on a business trip that week, mentioning he would be back in a month, so almost out of boredom and curiosity, and also wanting to know what had happened to his friend, Michael traveled up north to investigate his friend’s disappearance on his own.

The first few days he had scanned the perimeter carefully, using a flashlight, and also a Lidar scanner. The Lidar scanner he borrowed from his father, without telling him, from his surveying equipment. It was the kind of technology that archaeologists had started using to survey forest jungles for ancient Mayan buildings. Whereas before, trying to trace the foundations of buildings was a tedious job with no guaranteed results, a Lidar scanner could penetrate the entire jungle with lasers, uncovering fragments of building artifacts easily on the computer screen.

Michael set up his Lidar scanner on the edge of the woods and began to survey the area. He didn’t notify anyone what he was doing, even the police, because they likely would have told him to leave, and probably call his father, and he didn’t want to have to explain everything.

Michael had waited for the police to finish their investigation and clear the area. After the police couldn’t find any remains of Ardwyn’s body by the end of the week, they gave up the search, without having enough resources to dedicate themselves to the case.

It was now that Michael had the entire woods to himself. He had carefully scanned the area with Lidar, dividing up the entire stretch into quadrants. Then within each quadrant, he had further boxed them off. He worked slowly, methodically, watching the Lidar scanner uncover the three dimensional landscape of the woods. There were hills, and ravines, large stones, and different densities of trees.

Then something curious showed up on his Lidar screen. A set of large stones arranged in a circle, deep in the woods. It didn’t look like a natural formation. Instead, it was a pattern of some sort. Maybe some ancient pre-colonial Indian stone structure.

Michael folded up his Lidar equipment and packed it in his backpack. He set out to venture out deep into the woods and find out what it could be exactly.