The forest tasted of iron and decay. John stirred, his tongue thick against the roof of his mouth, the metallic tang sharpening his senses before his eyes opened. Above him, branches wove a latticework of shadows, trembling as if sharing secrets. No stars pierced the canopy—only a suffocating dark, alive with the hum of unseen wings and the creak of ancient wood.
Car. Girls. Road trip. The memories surfaced like debris from a shipwreck. They’d been laughing, hadn’t they? Windows down, radio static blending with pine-scented air. Then—nothing. A void where the rearview mirror should’ve reflected his friends’ faces.
“He’s conscious.”
The voice slithered through the gloom. John turned, his spine scraping against damp bark. Two figures materialized—a girl cloaked in a coat the color of sulfur, her companion tall and gaunt as a sapling stripped by blight. Their flashlight cast jagged light across faces too pale, too smooth, as though carved from alabaster and left unfinished.
“Drink.” The boy thrust a canteen forward, plastic warped by heat.
John recoiled. “Where are my friends?”
The girl tilted her head, a marionette considering its strings. “Ari,” she said, gesturing to her companion. “I’m Lyra. We require your… particular skills.”
A doctor’s instincts surfaced through the fog. “Someone’s injured?”
They exchanged a glance that lasted a heartbeat too long. “Yes,” Ari lied.
It was the hesitation that decided him. John grabbed the canteen, swallowing tepid water that did nothing to quench the thirst gnawing his throat. Survival calculus: two adolescents versus wilderness. For now, he’d play along.
The forest reshaped itself as they walked. Trees leaned closer, their bark split into glyph-like patterns. John’s shoes sank into humus that pulsed faintly, rhythmically, beneath his soles. Time distended—minutes? hours?—marked only by the worsening ache in his legs.
“Rest,” he gasped, collapsing against a trunk.
Lyra’s flashlight beam didn’t waver. “Nearly there.”
When his legs finally failed, they carried him. Ari’s hands burned cold through John’s shirt, a chill that seeped into marrow. Hypothermic shock? his medical mind supplied, even as consciousness frayed.
Dawn arrived as betrayal. The clearing revealed itself—a perfect circle where no birds sang. Nine trees formed a grim perimeter, their trunks blackened, leaves rust-red despite the season. At their roots: bones. Not animal.
Lyra knelt, her fingers painting his forehead with something warm and coppery. “The dream showed you to us,” she murmured. “A healer marked by moonlight.”
Shapes emerged from the wood—pale, elongated things in burial shrouds. Their chant vibrated in John’s molars, a drone that bypassed ears to rattle directly in the skull.
“What war?” he rasped.
Ari pressed a blade to John’s wrist. “Yours burns cities. Ours saves them.”
The cut bloomed crimson. As blood pooled, the forest shifted.
John’s consciousness unraveled—threads of self snagging on root networks, merging with mycelial whispers. He felt the cancer first: pipelines beneath the soil, poison seeping from faraway factories. Felt the trees’ slow screaming as their veins clogged.
Memories surged to fill the void—Delia’s laughter as she bandaged stuffed animals, Violet’s hands steadying his own during residency. Love as anchor, as tether.
The shroud-keepers’ song crescendoed. John’s blood seeped into the largest tree’s roots. A shudder ran through the earth—not death rattle, but rebirth. Blackened bark sloughed away, revealing verdant flesh beneath.
Lyra leaned close, her breath smelling of turned soil. “You’ll live forever here,” she said, not unkindly. “In every new leaf.”
Epilogue
Search parties found the abandoned car, its interior sprouting luminous fungi. The girls were never located, though hikers occasionally report twin figures in yellow and gray—guardians flanking an oak whose branches drip crimson sap each autumn.
As for John?
Look closely where clearcut borders meet old growth. There, in the dappled shadows, you might glimpse a man-shaped ripple in the leaves. Some say he tends to blighted saplings, his touch leaving bark smooth as human skin. Others claim the trees themselves whisper medical Latin when storms approach.
All agree on this: the forest grows healthier each year.
And hungrier.
