The woods are thick here, a tangle of ancient trunks and limbs that groan and sway like lungs breathing their last desperate gasps.

But these trees—moss-etched and rife with the hungry mouths of a thousand more hungry insects, these broken fingers grasping for the moon-hung sky—these trees are not what you or I would even understand as being… alive. See, that would be far too simple.

This cursed clutch of branch and shadow is something else entirely, something born of blood and betrayal, nurtured with petty thoughts and poison promises.

You breathe and they breathe. And through them, beneath them, all around them and therefore you, something else emerges. From all the tales you were told, all the books you read, all the ones who said „Don’t go,” you expected darkness.

She is light.

Ball lightning come to earth, tendrils touching each tree like a long-lost lover arrived home at last, the earth beneath her cracking deep as it gives itself up to her. Forward she moves, or maybe she moves you, and when she stops or you stop or the world stops, there are no woods, no grove nor ground. There is only her and you and what comes next.

Dazzled, your mind says mother. Your mind says beloved. Your mind says run and retreat and no.

This, this is what you have come for. She is who you have come for.

She lifts her blinding head, one eye black and deep as a coal mine, and she says, „Ask.”

What do you do?