Control
The Forest Full
c
The woods breathed. Shadows pooled thicker here, swallowing torchlight whole. Elders called it the Hollowed Grove—a place where compass needles spun like drunk dancers and footprints vanished behind you. Still, they came. Hunters chasing rumors of antlers wider than wagon wheels, starry-eyed lovers seeking moonlit clearings for trysts, fools convinced they’d outsmart the dark. None returned grinning. Something lived in that tangle of oak and thorn. Not animal, not spirit—hungrier. You felt it first in your teeth, a low hum beneath the soil. Then came the whispers, not from the trees but *between* them, words fraying at the edges like rotten thread. “Stay,” they crooned. “Stay and grow roots.” Survivors (the few there were) babbled about shifting trails and eyes glinting high in branches. A woodsman once staggered into town clutching a birch leaf the size of his head, veins pulsing faintly blue. He bit three men before they locked him in the grain cellar. By dawn, he’d crumbled into mulch and dandelion fluff. The grove’s heart was worse—a clearing where the air tasted of burnt honey. Stones jutted like broken teeth around a pool so still it showed not your reflection, but something older. Lean too close, they said, and the water would show you tangled in ivy, smiling as bark split your skin. We burned the maps. Salted the border paths. But on windless nights, when the village dogs howl at nothing? You can hear it. A dry rustle, slow and patient, slithering under doors. The grove remembers. And it’s always thirsty.
