Chapter 4: Echoes of the Eaten

Chapter 4: Echoes of the Eaten

Juniper returned to the cabin with a heavy glass bottle and an even heavier heart. The sap she’d collected was a dark, sluggish thing, and it felt woefully inadequate, like a single bucket of water thrown against a raging forest fire. The conversation with Silas’s family echoed in her mind: The forest is waking up. The sap is failing.

She found her grandmother awake, her gaze fixed on the fractured door, a low, delirious mutter escaping her lips. "The lines are blurring... the roots are thirsty..."

"Gran, I got the sap," Juniper said softly, showing her the bottle.

Elara’s eyes, clouded with fever, didn't seem to register it. "Elias," she whispered, the name a pained exhalation. "Poor, foolish Elias. He thought a bigger meal would buy a longer peace. The woods taught him otherwise."

The name meant nothing to Juniper, but the chilling tone of her grandmother's voice sparked a flicker of a memory, distant and indistinct. A memory she always pushed away. Of a man's shape on the ground. The wrongness of it.

Frustration warred with her fear. The answers she needed were locked behind her grandmother's delirium. The sap was a bandage, not a cure. She needed to understand the disease. She needed the whole story, not just the terrifying final chapter she was living through.

Secrets, she thought, scanning the small, familiar cabin. Gran was a creature of habit and hiding. Where would she keep the heart of her secrets? Not in the map chest, that was for emergencies. This would be something deeper, something closer to the core of their lives. Her eyes fell on the great stone hearth, the altar for their nightly ritual, the one broken piece that had started this nightmare.

She ran her fingers along the rough-hewn stones near the base, feeling for anything loose. One stone, darker than the others and worn smooth by generations of fires, shifted slightly under her touch. Her breath caught. Using the tip of her utility knife, she pried it loose. Behind it, wrapped in oilskin, lay a thick, leather-bound book.

It wasn't a book; it was a journal. The cover was worn soft, the leather cracked like dry river mud. She opened it, and the scent of old paper and bitter sap rose to meet her. The first page was written in a spidery, elegant script she didn't recognize. As she turned the pages, the handwriting changed, becoming bolder, then more cramped, then finally settling into the familiar, slanted cursive of her grandmother. It was a legacy, passed from one Keeper to the next. A chronicle of their prison sentence.

She sat at the table, the bottle of thin sap forgotten, and began to read. The early entries were terse, factual accounts of survival.

'1884. The pact holds. The woods took a sick bear from the northern ridge. The winter will be quiet.'

'1902. The McGregor family, their line now ended. They tried to outrun the hunger. A fool's errand. The woods claimed them on the third day. We found only a splintered wagon wheel. They are now among the Eaten.'

The Eaten. The word was capitalized, a proper noun for a terrible fate. It appeared again and again. Families who broke the rules, travelers who strayed from the path, children who wandered off at dusk. They weren't just killed; they were consumed, erased, digested by the living land itself.

Juniper's hands trembled as she turned the pages, devouring generations of fear. She found entries about the ancestors of Silas and Mary, the Thatchers, chronicling their grim duty alongside her own family, the Ravens. They were all in this together, a handful of families standing guard over a slumbering god's stomach.

Then, she found it. An entry in her grandmother's hand, the ink slightly blurred as if from a falling tear. The date was from thirteen years ago.

'The Awakening is upon us again. The sap thins, the Hunters grow bold. The cycles of hunger shorten. Elias Thorne believes he has found a new way. A shortcut. He speaks of a greater offering, a blood sacrifice to shock the woods back into a deep slumber. I have warned him. The old ways are not suggestions; they are the bars of our cage. To bargain with the stomach is madness.'

The name again. Elias Thorne. A cold dread, sharp and specific, coiled in Juniper's gut. She read on, her heart hammering.

'He has done it. The fool. He lured a hiker from the parklands, a man in a bright red coat. He performed his ritual at the Heartwood. I felt the tremor, the sickening lurch of the Deepwood as it took the offering. But it was not appeased. It was enraged. A meal given freely is not the same as a meal taken. It was an insult to its nature.'

A memory, sharp and vivid, pierced through the fog of years. She was five years old, holding her Gran's hand. The air smelled of ozone and something sweet, like rot. Lying on a bed of black moss was a man. His body was... wrong. Twisted. But it was the other one that held her gaze. Standing beside him was another man, impossibly still, dressed in a bright red coat, the color a violent slash against the muted greens and browns of the woods. He wasn't looking at the body. He was looking at her. And his eyes were empty. Utterly, terrifyingly blank.

Juniper slammed the journal shut, a gasp tearing from her throat. The Hiker in Red. The Hunter.

With a trembling hand, she opened the book again to the final entry on that page. Her grandmother's script was a barely controlled scrawl.

'It is worse than I feared. The woods does not just eat. It absorbs. It remembers. It has taken the hiker's life and given his empty shell a new purpose. A new, relentless hunger. He is the woods' eternal Hunter now, a memory given claws, cursed to stalk its borders. Elias Thorne lies broken at the Heartwood, his own foolish ritual having claimed him. He is Eaten. But the Hiker in Red... he remains. An echo that will never fade.'

The creature that had clawed at their door wasn't a beast born of the forest's own flesh. It was a man. A man who had been consumed and repurposed, turned into a tireless predator, a ghost haunting the prison he’d died in. The threat was no longer a force of nature. It was personal. It had a face.

A chilling thought made her scan the description of Elias Thorne again. 'A good man, if a foolish one. Stubborn. Loyal. Always humming that ridiculous lullaby to his daughter. He even had the old Raven family nose, crooked just so.'

Juniper's hand flew to her own nose, tracing the distinct, crooked bridge she shared with her grandmother. The lullaby... it was the same one Gran sang to her when she couldn't sleep.

The dead man from her first memory wasn't just a Keeper. He wasn't just a cautionary tale in a dusty journal. He was one of them. And his catastrophic failure was the reason a monster wearing a dead man's face was now hunting his family.