Chapter 14: The Mark of the Woods

Chapter 14: The Mark of the Woods

There was no thought, only a primal, desperate command that screamed through my entire being: RUN. I half-dragged, half-carried the jogger, her dead weight a leaden anchor slowing me down. Behind us, the Heartwood Tree was dying, and its death was the death of a world. The singular, unified shriek of a thousand souls had fractured into a cacophony of individual agonies as the great trunk split apart. The very ground bucked and rolled, throwing us to our knees. I held onto the jogger, shielding her head with my body as a branch thick as a telephone pole crashed down nearby, shattering the earth.

The death metal still blasted from the small speaker clutched in my fist, a chaotic anthem to the destruction I had wrought. It was my shield, the sonic poison that kept the forest’s consciousness scrambled and unable to focus its remaining power on me. The path we had followed into this nightmare was gone, erased by the churning chaos. The forest was no longer a thinking predator with rules and lures; it was a dying beast, thrashing in its death throes, and we were trapped inside its convulsing body.

Trees, ancient and vast, groaned and toppled, their roots tearing free from the unstable ground. The non-Euclidean loops and tricks of perspective that had been the forest’s weapons were now its death spasms. A wall of impenetrable thorns would rise up before us, only to dissolve into mist a second later. The ground would drop away into a dark chasm, which would then seal itself with a sickening lurch. There was no logic to it anymore, no system to debug. There was only raw, primordial power coming undone at the seams.

I ran on pure instinct, guided by a desperate, animal sense of ‘away’. I no longer consulted Abernathy’s rules; his map was for a functioning system, and I had just crashed the server. I followed the path of least resistance, scrambling over writhing roots, ducking under the splintered remains of falling branches, the jogger’s limp form a constant, terrible responsibility.

Her blonde ponytail swung wildly, slapping against my arm. I glanced at her face. Her eyes were still unfocused, but they were clenched shut now, her features tight with a kind of subliminal pain, as if some distant part of her was aware of the pandemonium around us. The sight spurred me on, a fresh spike of adrenaline cutting through my exhaustion. I had not come this far, broken the mind of a god, to be buried in the rubble of its corpse.

The air grew thick with the smell of ozone and freshly split wood. The sky above, visible in fractured glimpses, was no longer a flat, leaden grey. It was streaked with the impossible, violent colors of a deep sunset—blood orange and bruised purple. It was the sky of my world, breaking through. We were close.

With a final, desperate burst of strength, I pushed through a curtain of hanging moss that felt strangely solid and stumbled forward, my feet hitting loose gravel. The transition was so abrupt, so jarring, that I fell, tumbling onto a familiar patch of dusty ground. The jogger collapsed beside me in a heap.

We were out.

I was lying at the edge of the trailhead parking lot. The familiar, comforting sight of the carved wooden sign—Silent Trail Loop—stood twenty feet away, a monument to a reality I no longer belonged to. The chaotic noise of the collapsing forest behind us was gone, replaced by the mundane, reassuring hum of a distant highway. The air was cool and crisp, filled with the gentle, natural sounds of chirping crickets and the rustle of ordinary, unthinking trees in the evening breeze.

The death metal was still screaming from the speaker in my hand. In the sudden peace of the normal world, it sounded obscene, a shard of profound wrongness I had dragged out with me. My thumb, shaking uncontrollably, found the power button and silenced it.

The sudden, absolute quiet was a shock. Not the crushing, malevolent Stillness of the forest, but a simple, welcome absence of noise. I lay on the gravel, my chest heaving, every muscle in my body screaming in protest.

A gasp from beside me made me turn. The jogger was stirring. She pushed herself up on her elbows, her eyes blinking rapidly. The blank, hollow vacancy was gone, replaced by a dazed, profound confusion. She looked at the darkening woods, then at me, then at her own dirt-streaked arms.

“What… what happened?” she asked, her voice hoarse, rusty from disuse. “I… I think I got turned around. The sun was going down.” She touched the back of her head, wincing. “Did I fall? My head is killing me.”

I stared at her. There was no memory of the Heartwood Throne in her eyes. No echo of the silent, screaming faces. No recollection of her soul being siphoned away like smoke. The system had crashed, and her memory of it had crashed too. The forest had taken everything from her, and in its destruction, it had given it all back, leaving behind nothing but the mundane, believable trauma of getting lost and taking a tumble. She was whole. She was free.

“You got lost,” I said, my own voice sounding alien and distant. “I heard you calling out. You must have hit your head. I helped you get back.”

It was a pathetic, flimsy lie, but it was the only story the real world could possibly accept. Her expression cleared, replaced by dawning comprehension and a wave of grateful relief.

“Oh my god,” she breathed. “Thank you. I don’t know what I would have done. You’re a hero.”

The word hung in the air, hollow and absurd. I was the man who had brought a speaker to a psychic gunfight. I was the man who had torn down a temple and fled the wreckage. I was no hero.

Later, after the paramedics had checked her over and her relieved husband had arrived to take her home, after I had given a clipped, evasive statement to a skeptical park ranger, I finally made it back to my apartment. The door clicked shut behind me, and I was once again cocooned in my small, ordered world of right angles and predictable systems. It felt like a flimsy cardboard box.

I stood under the scalding spray of the shower for a long time, trying to wash the feeling of the forest’s wrongness off my skin, but it was a stain on my mind, not my body. I was exhausted to the bone, but sleep felt like a distant country I could never visit again.

Wrapped in a towel, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror, steam swirling around me. My reflection was a stranger. My face was gaunt, scratched, and bruised. There were new, haunted lines around my eyes. I looked older. I looked… different.

I leaned closer to the glass, my breath fogging the surface. I stared into my own eyes, trying to find the man who had started his routine Sunday hike just that morning. But my gaze snagged on something. Something in my right eye.

At first, I thought it was a trick of the light, a reflection on the wet surface of my cornea. But it wasn't. There, embedded in the familiar, plain brown of my iris, was a pattern. It was impossibly faint, a delicate, web-like tracery of a slightly darker hue, like a watermark on paper.

It was a spiral.

My blood ran cold. I stared, my heart hammering against my ribs not with fear, but with a sudden, soul-crushing understanding. The Heartwood Tree had cracked. Its influence had shattered. But in its final moments, as its system catastrophically failed, a single data packet had been transferred. A backup file. A seed.

I hadn't left the woods empty-handed. When it broke, a tiny piece of its ancient, silent, hungry consciousness had broken off.

And it had lodged itself in me.