The forest god didn’t move like a thing made of flesh.
It moved like ritual.
Its limbs bent in unnatural ways, stretching and twisting with purpose. Every motion echoed like a prayer whispered through the cracks of a coffin lid. Moss sloughed off its faceless head as it stepped from the hollow, leaving behind a trail of spores that shimmered gold in the fog-dimmed light.
Lark could not move.
She wasn’t frozen by fear though fear was boiling in her chest like tar but by something deeper. Something ancient. Her body felt remembered by this place, as though the roots beneath the clearing had once shaped her from bark and breath.
Marcus, or whatever he had become, stood silently beside the tree. His root-covered arms hung loose at his sides. His expression was one of reverence, not fear.
The forest god turned its head toward her.
Or maybe it didn’t have a head. The thing had no face, no eyes, no mouth. Just a smooth plane of moss and bark where expression should be. And yet Lark felt seen.
Not in the casual way people pass each other on the street. But wholly, deeply, cellularly seen.
Her childhood nightmares.
Her teenage regrets.
The time she let her mother’s final voicemail go unanswered because she couldn’t bear to hear her voice again.
All of it. Seen.
Inside her head, that voice bloomed again, like rot seeping into untouched wood.
“You left us in the soil.”
Lark staggered back. “What are you?”
It stepped closer. Roots coiled at its feet, sliding through the dirt like fingers under skin.
“I am what remains when memory is buried too long. I am the hunger beneath grief. I am the one who remembers when you forget.”
Marcus turned to her, his smile gentle. “It doesn’t have a name, Lark. Names are for things that can die. This… it grows.”
“No.” Her voice cracked. “I don’t belong here.”
“You do.” Marcus stepped forward. His barklike skin split slightly as he moved, revealing raw, pulsing red beneath. “You were always meant to return. That’s why the house called to you.”
“I’m not part of this!” she shouted. “I don’t want to be!”
The god knelt.
The movement made no sound, no creak or thud. The clearing fell unnaturally silent, as if the forest was holding its breath.
Its arm reached out, brushing the edge of the pit where she had fallen.
And the faces in the earth opened their mouths.
Hundreds of them. In unison.
Whispers spilled forth like smoke:
“We remember you, Lark.”
She turned, heart hammering. “No. That’s not my name. That’s not who I am—”
Memories surged forward.
Not hers.
Others’.
A woman with hands covered in soil, planting seeds in a circle of stones.
A child’s voice reciting verses in a language no longer spoken.
A figure dragging a bloodstained root bundle through the forest by moonlight.
The memories burned into her skull like roots tunneling through soft earth.
“You are made of forgotten things,” the forest god said, and now its voice was a storm inside her, rattling her bones. “We fed you to the earth, and the earth grew you crooked. But you can be made whole.”
Lark fell to her knees. Her hands trembled. She looked down and gasped.
Her fingers.
The tips were stained black not with dirt, but with something living. Tiny rootlets curled from beneath her nails.
“No…” she whispered. “No, no, no…”
“You’re not dying,” Marcus said gently, kneeling beside her. “You’re becoming.”
The forest trembled.
Above them, the trees began to sway in a circle, despite the air being still. Bark split. Leaves fell like ash. The clearing’s center glowed with a sickly amber light.
The god turned its focus to the massive tree behind Marcus. Its limbs rose, and the tree responded.
It opened.
Not metaphorically.
The bark split down the trunk like a door cracking wide. Inside, there was no wood just darkness and the sound of breathing.
It was a womb. A crypt. A cathedral.
“Step in,” the god said, its many arms now spread wide like a priest offering absolution. “And remember everything.”
Lark stumbled back, pulse thudding like a snare drum.
“I don’t want to be remembered,” she said. “I want to be free.”
Marcus’s face softened. “Then you’ll stay lost. And it will come for you again. In dreams. In forests. In places you think are safe.”
She ran.
She didn’t know if it would work. She didn’t care.
Her legs moved, fueled by adrenaline and the primal scream of not yet. She crashed through the roots, over the pit of faces, into the fog.
Branches tore at her clothes. Thorns scratched at her arms. The trees moaned as she passed, but none tried to stop her. Or maybe they did, and she just outran them.
The forest blurred into one long corridor of moss and breath.
And then light.
Real light.
Sunlight.
She burst through the tree line and tumbled into a clearing.
But not the same one.
This was new. Empty. Quiet. And dry.
No roots moved beneath the soil.
No faces pressed through the earth.
She stood, panting, and turned slowly.
The forest behind her was still.
No whisper.
No hum.
No Marcus.
No god.
Just trees.
Ordinary trees.
For now.
Lark dropped to her knees, dirt in her nails, breath catching on sobs that wouldn’t come out right.
She was free.
Or so it seemed.
But in her palm… a seed.
Small.
Dark.
Pulsing.
