22 Apr Greenwake

Part I

Eli Martin had photographed frostbitten tundras in Nunavut and jungles thick with steam in Suriname. He had waded through mangrove swamps in Myanmar, waiting for hours to catch the flick of a rare bird’s wing or the twitch of an ear in the trees. Yet despite all those journeys, nothing stirred the deep, familiar ache beneath his ribs quite like a mystery—especially one that seemed rooted in the earth itself.

He first heard about Greenwake over coffee at a truck stop north of Darrington, Washington. The barista was in her early twenties, her face marked by sleepless nights and the residual edge of nicotine. She mentioned the name casually, after Eli told her he was searching for “forgotten woods” to photograph for a limited-run nature magazine.

“Try the stretch out past mile marker forty-four,” she said, sliding his cup across the counter. “Locals call it Greenwake. GPS cuts out back there. It gets real quiet. People say time stops.”

Her tone wasn’t teasing. That was what caught his attention. She didn’t grin or wink. She simply shrugged, as though describing a change in the weather.

Eli returned to his rental car, opened his journal, and carefully wrote down the name.

* * * * * *

The trailhead was unmarked. Just a gap in the treeline past a rusted-out signpost, half-swallowed by weeds. His gear felt unusually heavy, though that could have been the elevation. As he stepped beneath the canopy, the cool hush of the forest gathered around him. The highway sounds faded entirely. There were no birds, no insects, only the soft sigh of wind passing through the leaves like breath channeled through cupped hands.

The quiet unsettled him. He checked his watch. The display read exactly 9:12 a.m.

The canopy thickened as he followed a narrow game trail deeper into the woods. Shafts of light broke through in narrow streaks, catching on pollen drifting through the air like falling snow. Every few yards, he paused to take photos—lichens glowing green against bark, a fox skull half-buried in moss, fungi unfurling like alien blossoms.

At first, his sense of direction remained steady. He marked his route using biodegradable ribbon, tying the strips just at eye level. But the forest resisted the effort. Within an hour, the ribbons had vanished. They hadn’t been torn down or blown away—there was no trace they had ever existed.

Still, Eli was no novice. People lost their bearings in deep woods all the time. He used his knife to carve a clean “X” into the bark of a cedar and moved forward with caution.

Half a mile later, he came upon the same tree.

It wasn’t just a similar cedar. It was identical—the same shallow gouge in the bark, the same burl shaped like an eye.

He turned around instinctively and looked behind him. There was no sign of a trail, no footprints, and no disruption in the undergrowth. The path he thought he had followed had dissolved behind him.

His mouth had gone dry. He unhooked his canteen and drank from it, all the while scanning the trees.

When he looked back at his watch, it still read 9:12.

He tapped the glass. Nothing changed. He held it to his ear and heard no ticking.

Muttering a curse under his breath, he pushed onward, trying to convince himself that the battery had died. But something had already shifted inside him—an unease that had begun in his gut and now crept into his chest like a slow frost spreading beneath the skin.

He attempted to retrace his steps, but the forest no longer matched his memory. Trees that had seemed ancient appeared young and untouched, their bark smooth and their foliage unnaturally vivid. He passed a shallow pool of water reflecting the sky, only the clouds above it were motionless. The light never shifted, no matter how long he stood there.

By the time he reached the edge of the forest, his body was drenched in sweat and his limbs trembled with exhaustion. Yet the light slanting through the branches remained unchanged. The angle of the sun had not shifted in the slightest.

He only noticed the change when he stepped out onto the gravel road. The light turned subtly cooler, touched now by the edges of dusk.

His car still sat where he had left it, but it was no longer intact. The frame had buckled inward like a collapsed tent. The tires had rotted away, and ivy had grown across the hood, curling through the windows and wrapping itself around the steering column. Moss blanketed the seats. The dashboard bore no sign of the recent past.

He staggered backward, struggling to make sense of what he was seeing. But the truth confronted him in the form of a sticker on the driver’s door—a weathered image of a raven with a cigarette in its beak, the same one he had applied the week before.

It was still there, just older now. The image had faded. The corners had curled and cracked from decades of sun exposure.

Eli ran a hand through his hair and pulled out his phone. It displayed no signal. No service bars. Not even the time. Just a blank void where the numbers should have been.

He followed the road on foot for what he estimated to be an hour, though time had ceased to hold meaning. Eventually, he spotted a gas station up ahead. The signage was sleek and digital, flashing updated fuel prices on a rotating LED board. The building itself gleamed with solar panels and touchscreen kiosks, a far cry from the rustic stations he remembered.

A young man in a slate-gray uniform stepped outside and looked him over with visible concern.

“Everything okay, sir?”

Eli hesitated. “What year is it?”

The attendant blinked. “Uh… 2054.”

Eli’s legs gave out beneath him. He collapsed onto the pavement, the world spinning, every detail disjointed and unreal.

He had walked into the woods at 9:12 a.m. on June 17th, 2024.

He had only been inside for a few hours.

At least, that was what he believed.

* * * * * *

At the sheriff’s office, the officer on duty didn’t believe a word of his story. Neither did the hospital staff who ran tests and found no drugs, no injuries, and no inconsistencies with his health—aside from a driver’s license dated 2018 and a name listed in the system as legally deceased for nearly three decades.

He was kept overnight for observation.

He did not sleep.

When his eyes closed, he saw vines forcing their way through windows. He heard voices whispering strings of numbers. And always, somewhere in the distance, there was a green eye watching him from beneath the soil. When he woke, his fingers were sticky with what looked like sap.

No one could offer an explanation.

With no charges filed and no identity that matched the current databases, they released him the next morning with a donated backpack, a change of clothes, and a Metro access card.

He boarded the next bus to the city and searched for the last known address he had shared with Claire.

He wasn’t certain what he hoped to find.

But he knew the forest wasn’t finished with him.

And something deep inside him—something hidden beneath confusion and fear—wasn’t finished with it, either.

Part II

Eli stood across the street from the house for nearly fifteen minutes before summoning the will to cross. The building’s structure remained unchanged—same frame, same tilt to the porch swing—but the details betrayed the passage of time. The old siding had been replaced with a newer material in muted earth tones. Solar shingles now covered the roof. The garden, once kept in precise rows that he and Claire had planted together, had grown into something decorative and ornamental. Clusters of artificial mulch and drought-resistant grasses lined the walkway where basil and wildflowers had once flourished.

It was still her house, but it no longer looked like her home.

He stepped onto the front path and stared at the door. He remembered when they had painted it a deep red after a night of wine and laughter. Now it was a subdued gray, untouched by any memory he recognized. He raised his hand to knock, hesitated, then knocked anyway.

For a long moment, no sound came from inside. He wondered if she still lived here or if the decades had taken her entirely. Just as he began to doubt the address, the door opened a few inches. A woman peered through the gap. Her face was thinner than he remembered, her hair streaked with white and tied at the nape of her neck. The years had softened the contours of her features but had not dimmed the intensity of her gaze. Her eyes remained sharp, gray-blue, and watchful—like the surface of a winter lake before the thaw.

She looked at him as if she were seeing a ghost.

“Can I help you?” she asked, her voice cautious but calm.

Eli opened his mouth, but the words caught in his throat. When he finally spoke, his voice sounded unsteady. “Claire,” he said. “It’s me. It’s Eli.”

She didn’t move. For several seconds, she didn’t even blink. Then she opened the door wider and stepped back, her expression hardening.

“That’s not funny,” she said, her tone clipped and cool. “Who told you to come here?”

“No one sent me,” he replied. He took a step forward, careful not to cross the threshold. “I know this is impossible, but I need you to believe me. I went into the forest—Greenwake, I think it’s called—and when I came out… everything had changed.”

He trailed off, unable to find the right words. Any explanation felt absurd the moment he tried to say it aloud.

Claire’s fingers curled tightly around the edge of the doorframe. She stared at him with a mixture of suspicion and disbelief. “Eli Martin was declared dead in 2026,” she said. “You can’t be him.”

“I can prove it.” He pulled out the worn leather wallet he had somehow retained through everything. From its folds, he removed an old photograph. The image had faded at the edges but remained legible. It showed the two of them sitting on a stone outcrop in Glacier National Park. Claire had her hand on his shoulder. Both of them were laughing, a marmot frozen mid-step on a boulder below.

Claire stared at the photo. She did not take it immediately. Her hand hovered above the image as though she feared it might disintegrate on contact. When she finally touched it, she ran her fingers along the corners.

“You had this?” she asked.

“It was in my pack,” he said. “The same one I had when I went in. Claire, I haven’t been gone more than a day. Maybe two at the most.”

Her eyes began to well with tears, but she blinked them away before they could fall. “That’s not possible,” she said, her voice cracking. “You disappeared. Your car was found covered in vines. They assumed you wandered off and never came back. You were declared legally dead in 2029, three years after you went missing.”

“I never even spent the night,” he said. “I walked in, took photos, followed a trail. Things felt strange, but I didn’t realize how wrong it all was until I came back and saw how much had changed.”

She held the photo against her chest and stepped aside, allowing him in without a word.

Inside, the living room bore faint echoes of the space they had once shared. The layout remained recognizable—couch against the left wall, bookshelves to the right—but the furniture had been replaced, the décor updated. The air lacked the warmth he remembered. A humming air purifier cast a soft blue glow from the corner, filling the room with a sterile light that seemed out of place.

Claire returned from the hallway carrying a clear plastic bin. She set it down on the coffee table and opened the lid. Inside were keepsakes: a dried flower pressed in a book, a keychain from a national park they had never revisited, and a bundle of old photographs bound with rubber bands. She sorted through them slowly. Each image brought subtle changes to her face—memories flickering behind her eyes, too many to name.

“I kept these long after everyone else let go,” she said. “I told myself there might be an answer someday. But after twenty years, you stop waiting. You survive instead.”

She handed him a folded sheet of paper. It was a photocopied missing persons flyer with his face at the center. Above the image, in bold letters, it read: MISSING – Eli Martin, last seen June 17, 2024. At the bottom, she had scrawled a message in her familiar cursive: Please help. Any information, call this number. I just want him home.

Eli sat down heavily, holding the flyer in both hands. “I don’t understand how this happened,” he said. “I didn’t sleep. I didn’t eat anything. I just… wandered.”

Claire sat across from him, her posture rigid. “Something happened in that forest,” she said. “And if you knew how many nights I spent trying to figure out what, you wouldn’t be so quick to go back.”

“I’m not trying to be reckless,” Eli replied. “But I need answers. That place wasn’t like any other wilderness I’ve explored. It felt wrong. The shadows didn’t shift. My watch stopped working. I kept seeing the same tree over and over, even after marking it with my knife.”

Claire folded her hands and stared at the floor. “You’ve been gone for thirty years. You talk about the forest like it’s some kind of riddle, but it’s not. It’s a trap. And if it let you go once, you shouldn’t tempt it again.”

Eli met her gaze. “What if it let me go for a reason? What if it’s not finished with me?”

She did not answer immediately. Instead, she looked toward the window, where the light had begun to fade. Her voice, when it came, was quiet but certain.

“There were others,” she said. “People who heard the same rumors. Hikers. Researchers. Thrill-seekers. They went into Greenwake hoping to map it, to study it. Most never came back. The few who did were… changed.”

Eli leaned forward. “What do you mean?”

“One man returned in 2047. He claimed he’d only spent an hour inside, but he couldn’t speak properly. He couldn’t write. He had gone in young and healthy. When he came out, his hair had turned white, and his hands trembled so badly he couldn’t hold a pen. He died in his sleep a week later—screaming.”

“That’s why I have to go back,” Eli said. “I need to understand it. If I can document what I saw—what happened—I might be able to stop it, or at least keep others from going in blind.”

Claire studied him for a long moment. “You’re not the same man who left,” she said. “But if you go back in there, I don’t think you’ll ever come out again.”

Eli glanced down at the photo she had given him. The smile on his face felt unfamiliar, as if it belonged to someone else. The colors had faded with time, and the moment it captured seemed more distant than the years alone could explain.

He folded the photo carefully, slipped it into his jacket pocket, and stood.

“I still have to try.”

Part III

Eli returned to Greenwake two weeks later, though the time he had spent away felt much longer. Each day had stretched thin with tension, as if something vital had been left unfinished among the trees. He could not articulate the compulsion that drove him to return, but it had grown louder with every passing hour. At night, he lay awake and stared at the ceiling, the shapes of branches flickering in his thoughts. In the morning, he sat at Claire’s kitchen table without touching his food, his gaze fixed on old photographs of wilderness trails and forest ridgelines, searching for clues he had not previously noticed.

He gathered everything he could still use: his last functioning DSLR camera, a handheld audio recorder, a waterproof notebook, and several laminated topographical maps of the region. Before leaving, he stood in Claire’s doorway and tried to reassure her. He told her this time would be different, that he would take more precautions, that he would not let the forest disorient him again. His voice lacked conviction, and he knew she heard the emptiness behind his words. She said nothing in return. Instead, she looked at him as if she were watching someone walk a narrow bridge toward the sea, too far along to turn back.

By midmorning, he arrived once more at the unmarked entrance to Greenwake. As he passed beneath the canopy, the temperature dropped abruptly. The change was not limited to air alone; it felt as if the forest operated according to rules that no longer aligned with the outside world. Each step on the moss-carpeted path landed without sound, but Eli sensed something stirring beneath the surface with every footfall—an unseen depth that responded to his presence.

Within minutes, the signs of abnormality returned. The sun, which had been high when he entered, remained suspended in the same position. His watch did not tick. The shadows beneath the trees failed to move. They remained frozen, cast in fixed positions.

He activated the audio recorder and raised it to his mouth, speaking in a steady voice about what he observed. When he played it back, the recording sounded distorted. His speech had slowed, the pitch warped as if filtered through water.

As he continued along the trail, something shifted in the periphery. A flicker of movement disappeared behind a narrow birch tree. The jacket had been blue—the same shade as the one he wore. He stopped and waited, listening. No sound followed. Then, again, he caught the shape of a man disappearing through the ferns on his right, just beyond clear sight.

He gave chase. His heartbeat quickened, each step accelerating as he closed the distance. The trail wound suddenly into a clearing that did not appear on his map.

A figure stood at the center.

At first glance, it resembled him. The same height, same frame, and even the same face—though this one appeared more withered. The man’s cheeks had hollowed, and his expression had emptied, as though the thoughts behind his eyes had decayed over time. His clothes were torn and filthy, coated in moss and streaks of soil. He moved in small, repetitive gestures, whispering to himself in a low, ceaseless rhythm that barely resembled speech.

Eli stepped closer, careful not to startle him.

The man did not react. He turned slowly in place, still murmuring, and then dropped to his knees. With a stick, he began drawing shapes in the damp earth: spirals, concentric rings, and a tree-like figure whose roots extended upward. His voice—Eli’s voice—repeated a single phrase, over and over, with subtle variations. “She waits, and waits, and waits—but there’s no door, no door, no…”

Eli turned and ran. The image stayed with him as he moved—the lifeless expression, the looping phrase, the sense that what he had witnessed was not an apparition but a possible outcome.

The deeper he traveled, the more the forest unraveled around him. Trails folded in on themselves. Landmarks appeared twice, sometimes mirrored, sometimes distorted. A grove of ash trees aligned in perfect symmetry reappeared on his left ten minutes after it had passed on his right. When he marked a boulder with a shallow slash of his knife, he encountered an identical stone minutes later with the same mark already carved into it.

Even sound had lost its linearity. The calls of birds repeated in precise intervals. A voice echoed through the trees—his own—delayed by nearly half a minute. When he turned to listen, the same phrase played again, unaltered.

At a fork in the path, he stopped. Both trails appeared identical. He could find no reliable marker to guide him.

Then the Warden stepped into view.

It did not walk into the clearing so much as emerge from a fold in the forest’s perspective, as though the trees had parted to reveal it only when they chose to allow it. The creature stood a head taller than Eli, its form vaguely human but built of something far older. Its skin resembled bark—twisted and dark, laced with grooves and cracks. Moss clung to its shoulders and trailed down its arms. Its face bore the faint suggestion of features: the ridge of cheekbones, the hollow where eyes might have rested, and a wide mouth that never fully formed. When it moved, the vines wrapped around its legs whispered against the ground.

Eli froze in place, every muscle coiled with uncertainty.

The Warden tilted its head, then spoke.

“Boundless, rooted, the tether sways,” it said. The voice did not travel through the air but instead arrived within Eli’s mind, low and reverberating. “You return. Again. Again.”

“What are you?” Eli asked. His voice wavered, despite his effort to remain composed. “What is this place?”

The Warden did not answer the question directly. It raised one hand—long and gnarled, like the limb of an ancient tree—and pressed it to the trunk beside it. The bark split open with a subtle crackle, revealing a cross-section of tree rings, each pulsing with a dim green light. Within the rings, Eli saw shapes—faces etched in impossible depth, layered so densely they blurred into each other.

“Each step deepens the memory,” the Warden said. “The forest keeps. The forest learns. What you take, it reclaims.”

“I haven’t taken anything,” Eli replied.

“You left. Then came again. And again.” The Warden turned its head slightly, as though studying him from a new angle. “You wear the shape. But you have no name.”

“I do have a name,” Eli said. “My name is Eli Martin.”

The Warden shimmered faintly, its form losing focus for a breath before reconstituting. “Not anymore.”

Eli lifted his camera and took a photo. The screen displayed only static. He tried again. The next image was a white blur. When he lowered the camera and looked again, the Warden was gone.

He turned in a slow circle, scanning the clearing, but there was no sign of the figure. The forest had swallowed it completely.

He retrieved his audio recorder and played back the last few minutes. The only sound was a harsh rush of wind, interspersed with faint whispers that did not match either his voice or the Warden’s.

He opened his notebook to sketch the symbols he had seen on the tree. The page was already filled with drawings. The handwriting was his own, but he had no memory of making the marks. The ink had bled into the page, forming shapes and symbols he did not recognize. One phrase had been repeated several times: roots remember, names dissolve.

A low hum rose around him. The air thickened with vibration, and the trees began to tremble. His balance shifted. His legs felt weak. Something unseen crawled beneath his skin, pulling him toward panic.

He turned and ran.

The trail changed with each step, but eventually, the trees began to thin. He caught a glimpse of light ahead—clear sunlight, warm and honest, not the unmoving glow of Greenwake. He pushed forward with everything he had left.

When he stumbled out of the trees and fell to his knees, the sky above him was blue. The clouds drifted again. The wind felt clean.

The world had changed again.

The road had been paved with fresh tar. Automated traffic markers blinked along its edge. Drones hummed overhead, scanning the lanes with blinking lights. A nearby transit station rose into view—sleek, metallic, and smooth in design. Chrome-paneled walls caught the sun and reflected back a version of reality that felt sterile and distant.

He approached a kiosk and leaned forward. The facial recognition camera scanned him, and the screen flashed a message in bold red text:
ERROR – ID NOT FOUND.

He tried to speak, to assert his identity, but the words felt unnatural in his mouth. His name emerged warped and slurred, stretched into sounds that didn’t belong in any known language.

He tried again. The result was no better.

An attendant arrived and scanned the chipped ID card from Eli’s wallet. He frowned as he read the screen.

“I’ve never seen this formatting before,” the man said. “You must be from an unincorporated district.”

“I’m Eli,” Eli said, carefully articulating each syllable. “Eli Martin. I’m from here. I went into the woods.”

The attendant offered him a polite but uncomprehending smile. “You should check with the city census office. They can help sort things out.”

Eli looked down at his hands. His fingers were stained green beneath the nails. A faint imprint of moss clung to the creases of his palms.

When he turned to look back, the forest had vanished behind a row of new housing units. Still, he could feel its presence lingering in the space behind his thoughts. It remained rooted in his memory, alive and watching.

And it remembered him.

Part IV

Eli remained in the city for less than a month.

At first, he stayed in temporary shelters, using what little documentation he still possessed to secure a cot. He sat among others displaced by circumstance—some who muttered to themselves, others who shouted into corners—and listened to their voices until they began to sound more coherent than his own. When he tried to speak with social workers or counselors, his words twisted midway through his sentences. Names slipped from his tongue. Familiar phrases broke apart, replaced by syllables that sounded alien, though they stirred something in his memory as if he had once known their meaning.

To keep himself grounded, he carried a notebook. In its pages, he recorded details he feared might vanish—his birthdate, Claire’s face, the year he entered the forest. But the entries diminished over time. His handwriting began to falter. The clean lines of his script gave way to shaky loops and angled strokes. One morning, he opened the notebook to find that he had written his name—Eli Martin—dozens of times across five consecutive pages. Each repetition grew less legible than the last, until the name fragmented entirely and gave way to a spiral inked in a single, continuous stroke.

Eventually, the shelters turned him away. They cited confusion and communication issues. He began sleeping in public parks, choosing spots near wooded areas where grass grew untamed. He often pressed his hands into the soil as if waiting for the earth to speak back.

In the months that followed, he returned to Greenwake six times.

The forest accepted him each time without resistance. However, with every return, it took a little more from him. On his second visit, he forgot how to operate his camera. On the third, he found that he could no longer understand the notes he had written. By the fourth, coherent thoughts came only when he spoke them aloud, as if sound itself anchored reality. On the fifth, he lost the ability to hold ideas in silence.

It was during that fifth return that Claire found him.

He appeared on her doorstep without shoes. Dirt clung to his feet and streaked his arms. A thin crust of dried blood lined his fingernails. His eyes were vacant. Beneath the grime, his face still resembled the man she had loved, but the expression he wore was hollow and drifting, as if the person inside had been reduced to echoes.

Claire did not speak when she opened the door. She simply stepped aside and let him enter. She guided him to the kitchen and handed him a mug of tea. He drank from it slowly, holding it with both hands as if he had forgotten what warmth felt like. The mug trembled slightly in his grip.

She asked him where he had been, but he gave no answer. Instead, he made quiet sounds—half-formed syllables and soft vocalizations that carried no clear meaning. After a while, he reached into the folds of his tattered coat and pressed a single leaf into her hand. Its edges were bruised, the veins blackened with rot.

He smiled as he gave it to her.

The next morning, he was gone.

Claire never saw him again.

* * * * * *

Several months later, her doctor confirmed that the cancer had metastasized. It had reached her spine. There would be no further treatment.

She asked the nurse to retrieve her old journals and a cedar box from the top shelf of her closet. Inside the box were photographs. She selected one and placed it on her nightstand. It showed Eli standing on a cliff edge, his camera slung across his chest. He was laughing at something she had said. She stared at it each evening, holding her gaze steady, willing the image to anchor something inside her that refused to settle.

She began writing letters addressed to him—not to the version who wandered now, but to the man who had vanished decades ago. In these letters, she described the world he had missed: cities rising faster than forests could reclaim, machines that responded to voices instead of touch, cars that no longer needed drivers. But most often, she wrote about the places they had once shared. She described the rust-colored deserts they had crossed, the ridgelines where wind had carried the smell of snow, and the river in the canyon where they had watched the eclipse reflect like fire in the water.

She did not know if the letters would ever reach him. She doubted he would recognize them even if they did. But writing them gave her something to hold onto as the hours thinned and the pain deepened.

She ended each letter with the same plea.

Don’t go back, Eli. Please. If any part of you remains, stay out of that place. I don’t want to lose you again.

* * * * * *

Somewhere beneath the canopy of Greenwake, a man moved along a looping path.

His feet were calloused and split. Soil darkened his toes. The clothing that still clung to him had rotted into strips, now interwoven with strands of grass and fragments of fern. His beard had become tangled with bark fibers. His skin had begun to resemble the trunks of the trees around him—dry, cracked, and marked by lichens.

His face had lost its sharpness. Though its structure remained human, the expression had softened into stillness. It was not peace that lingered there, but a kind of vacant tranquility, as though the last vestiges of intention had eroded away.

He mumbled constantly as he walked. The sound drifted in pitch and pattern, shifting between unfamiliar syllables and fragments of languages long forgotten. Occasionally, he would pause and place his hand on a tree trunk, pressing his forehead to the bark, standing silently as though listening for something deeper than sound. At other times, he knelt beside still water and gazed into it, trying to recognize the face that stared back at him through the distorted reflection.

He no longer spoke his name.

He no longer remembered it.

Names belonged to people who lived outside the forest, and he did not believe himself to be among them anymore.

Occasionally, he encountered remnants—pieces of a life that had once belonged to someone else. A torn strap caught on a branch. A page from a notebook, its lines faded and curling. A single boot half-swallowed by the ground. He would examine these objects without recognition, turning them in his hands before letting them fall again, unaware they had ever been his.

He dreamed while walking. The visions came without sleep—fragments of a woman’s voice, the feel of sunlight on glacier ice, the smell of lavender smoke curling through mountain air. But the images faded quickly. In their place came only the consistent murmur of insects, the rhythm of roots moving beneath the soil, and the weightless shifting of wind through leaves.

* * * * * *

At the edge of the forest, where the old entry path had once broken open between the trees, a new visitor emerged from the underbrush. She was young, her face hidden beneath the brim of a hat. She carried a rented camera and clutched a folded map covered in hand-drawn annotations. She had read the rumors online—stories about a forest where time failed to flow and nothing ever aged. Some message boards had mentioned Greenwake, though the coordinates rarely matched and the warnings were always vague.

Curiosity had overpowered caution.

Now she stood beneath the same canopy, watching as particles of dust drifted through unmoving shafts of light.

Her footsteps made no sound on the moss.

Above her, birds repeated the same song three times in perfect rhythm. She paused and turned, sensing the shift in her surroundings. Behind her, a figure stood between the trees. His shape resembled a man, though his outline was softened by vines and silence. His face held no menace and offered no welcome. What remained was patience—the kind that soil carries, deep and unhurried.

He did not move toward her.

She adjusted her grip on the camera and turned back to the path ahead, unaware that she had already passed the point where maps ceased to matter.

Behind her, the figure stepped silently into the green.

The forest remembered.

It always did.