They called me “Wyrmwood,” though I once had no name. I was the silent whisper beneath the forest floor, the yearning tendril in the dark. When men came to hack and burn, to plow and pave, I watched, I waited, I grew.
Long ago, before the hammer rang and the bell tolled in their stone churches, I sprawled across this land like a godless hymn. My roots coiled in the earth’s womb, my branches clawed the skies, and my leaves whispered secrets to the wind. But men, with their greed sharp as their axes, carved the heart out of my forest kin. They did not see the soul that bled from every stump, the agony that seeped into the soil.
And so I learned pain.
It was then I began to change. From pain came purpose, and from purpose came power. I became more than wood and leaf. I fed on the rot they left behind—on bones buried hurriedly beneath fallen oaks, on the screams that echoed as witches burned, their ashes sown like bitter seed. My roots drank it all.
When I first moved—truly moved—it was subtle. A bramble twisted round a soldier’s ankle, a sapling that grew overnight to pierce a sleeping man’s throat. They dismissed it. Superstition, they said, as foolish as fearing shadows. But I was the shadow. And I was watching.
The villagers of Thornwick were the worst. They cut down an ancient grove to make room for their thatched filth, their pigpens, their chapel of lies. One by one, I took them. Children wandered into the woods chasing whispers not their own. Hunters found their own traps turned against them, thorns nesting in their eyes like crows in sockets. Roots pulled down walls, slow as a noose tightening around a traitor’s neck.
Then came the priest.
He wore silver around his neck and smelled of iron and arrogance. He walked with the confidence of a man who believed himself righteous. They called him Father Aelric. I called him rot wrapped in silk.
He preached that I was the Devil’s hand, that my forest was cursed. His followers lit torches and marched into my heart, chanting their pale prayers. I welcomed them. They burned a ring through my body, left the ground scarred like a whipped slave. But deep below, I was laughing. Fire consumes flesh, yes, but it feeds the roots.
They never saw the thorns growing beneath their chapel. They never heard the ivy crawling over rooftops at night, whispering sermons of their own. Then, on the blood moon, the earth cracked open like an egg, and I rose.
I shaped a body from bark and bile, bones stolen from crypts, sinew twisted from vines. I was beautiful in the way storms are—terrible and inevitable. The villagers fled, screaming prayers to their god. But gods don’t listen in these woods.
Father Aelric stood alone, silver crucifix in hand, muttering Latin like a dying bee. He thrust it toward me, as if light could pierce my dark. I leaned close. My breath withered the grass. My voice, when it came, was like wind through gallows.
“What god hears you now?”
He fell to his knees. He begged. Cried. Then, finally, he did something unexpected. He laughed.
“You think you’re nature?” he said, spitting blood. “You’re not the forest. You’re what we buried in it.”
His words rooted in me like thistles. I remembered—yes, there was something before the pain. A time I was less. A time I was… man.
The witches they burned—one had a child. A babe buried in the roots of the grove. The villagers thought the earth would swallow the sin. But the earth does not forget. I was that sin, reborn. Not of leaf and bark, but of vengeance and grief.
My wrath faltered. I staggered, groaning like an old tree in a storm. In my hesitation, Aelric rose and drove the crucifix into my chest. Silver burned, not flesh, but memory. I screamed, and the forest screamed with me.
I did not die. No. I shed. The body of bark crumbled like dry leaves. I retreated deep, deep into the soil.
Now I wait. I whisper. I grow.
They will forget again. They always do.
But the root below remembers. And next time, I will not hesitate.
