Chapter 11: The Heartwood Throne

Chapter 11: The Heartwood Throne

The transition was absolute. One moment I was wading through the psychic static of a hundred tormented souls, the next I was standing on the shore of a sea of pure, perfect silence. The clearing was a wound in the fabric of the woods, a circular space of unnatural perfection where not a single blade of grass grew. The ground was bare, dark earth, packed hard as stone. The oppressive canopy of interlocking branches that had suffocated the forest floor was gone, opening up to a sky the color of a leaden shroud. There was no wind. No life. The echoes of the eaten did not exist here. This was not the graveyard; it was the stomach.

The silence was a physical assault. It was a pressure that pushed in from all sides, a crushing weight that felt like being a thousand feet underwater. I couldn't hear my own ragged breathing. I couldn't hear the frantic, terrified drumming of my own heart. The lack of these internal, life-affirming sounds was profoundly disorienting, making me feel disembodied, as if my consciousness was floating untethered from the shell of my body. It was a silence so profound it was deafening, an overwhelming roar of nothing. This was the 'Stillness' Abernathy had scrawled about, the fundamental frequency of this place, the engine of its wrongness.

And in the exact center of the clearing, it stood.

My mind struggled to process what my eyes were seeing, trying to file it under a familiar category like ‘tree’ and failing catastrophically. It was colossal, wider than my apartment building, its upper branches scraping the low, grey ceiling of the sky. Its wood was not brown or grey but a deep, bruised purple-black, like a perpetual contusion. It radiated an aura of age so immense it made the concept of human history feel like a fleeting spark. This was the heart of the system, the central server from which all the forest’s malevolent code was executed.

But it was the bark that shattered my sanity.

It was not bark. It was a writhing, undulating relief sculpture of human faces. Hundreds of them, thousands, stretched and distorted across the massive trunk and thick, python-like roots. They were melded into the very grain of the wood, their features flowing into one another in a tapestry of silent, eternal agony. I saw the gaunt, confused face of a man in tweed who could only be Abernathy. I saw the wide-eyed terror of the woman in 80s hiking gear. I saw the small, round face of the little boy, his mouth a perfect ‘O’ of loss. They were all here, every echo I had just walked past, their final moments of despair captured and immortalized. Their silent screams were the very texture of the tree. They weren’t just powering the forest; they were the forest.

At its base, nestled amongst the thick, face-covered roots, was a splash of shocking, artificial color. Bright pink running shorts. A grey technical shirt. A neat blonde ponytail.

It was the jogger.

She was sitting on the ground, her back resting against the colossal trunk as if it were a park bench. She was perfectly still, her posture unnervingly serene. Her hands rested limply in her lap. Her head was tilted slightly to the side. Her eyes were wide open, but they saw nothing. They were flat, glossy, vacant pools, staring into a world I couldn't see and was grateful for it. She was breathing—I could see the faint, shallow rise and fall of her chest—but she was not there. She had been hollowed out, her consciousness scooped from her skull.

The pink water bottle in my hand suddenly felt impossibly heavy. It was a relic from her life, a vibrant symbol of the woman who had stretched, full of energy and purpose, at the trailhead what felt like a lifetime ago. I looked from the bottle to her empty face, and a cold, protective rage sliced through my terror.

I forced my legs to move, each step a monumental effort against the crushing pressure of the silence. The bare earth was cold and dead beneath my feet. As I drew closer, I saw it. A faint, almost imperceptible shimmer in the air around her, a heat-haze of pale, silvery light. It was being drawn from her—from her head, her chest—and was flowing in slow, lazy tendrils towards the tree. The strands of light wicked up the bark, absorbed by the silently screaming faces, which seemed to pulse with a faint, internal luminescence as they fed.

The tree was drinking her.

It was feeding on her memories, her personality, her fear, her life force. It was slowly, methodically digesting her soul, breaking it down into raw energy to sustain itself. This was the end of the line. This was what it meant to be consumed by The Stillness. First, it breaks your mind with loops and illusions. Then, it leads you to this throne of despair. And then, it eats. She wasn't dead, not yet. She was in the process of being unerased, her essence becoming another screaming face in the bark.

"Hey!" I tried to shout, but the word was born and died in my throat, a mere vibration in my larynx that the silence instantly annihilated. The sound didn't even reach my own ears.

I knelt in front of her, close enough to feel the chilling aura of absolute vacancy that surrounded her. "Can you hear me?" I mouthed, my voice a useless tool. I waved a hand in front of her blank eyes. Nothing. No flicker of recognition. No response at all. I gently touched her shoulder. Her skin was cold, clammy.

Frantic, I reached out and gave her a gentle shake. "Wake up!"

The moment my fingers made firm contact, a jolt went through me. It wasn't electricity; it was a flash of pure, undiluted information. I saw a snippet of her last moments: the familiar path twisting into a nightmarish labyrinth, the rising panic, the gut-wrenching realization that she was lost, the soul-crushing terror as the trees themselves seemed to close in around her. I felt her despair, her final, fading hope as she stumbled into this clearing and saw the colossal tree, a landmark that promised… something. Safety. An ending.

The tree had lured her here, promising a respite, and then had simply… turned her off.

And as I reeled back from the psychic shock, every single face on the vast, monstrous trunk of the Heartwood Tree slowly, and in perfect unison, turned. The thousands of stretched, screaming, silent faces, the eyes of the eaten, all swiveled in their wooden prisons to fix their collective, ancient gaze directly on me.

The Stillness, the heart of the forest, had finally noticed my intrusion. And it was hungry.