Evan could not shake the feeling that the forest was leaning closer.The clearing where they had first seen the Green Man no longer felt like open space. The trees stood tighter now, their trunks swollen and damp, bark slick as skin. The symbol carved into the oak had grown darker overnight. What had once looked like a simple spiral now twisted into something layered — rings within rings, like an eye trying to open.
Lena knelt beside it, tracing the grooves. “This wasn’t carved,” she whispered. “It pushed its way out.”
As if in answer, the wood pulsed.
Evan stumbled backward. The spiral flexed, bark cracking outward, revealing something beneath — not wood, not sap, but something fibrous and veined. It glistened. It breathed.
And from deeper in the forest came that sound again.
A wet dragging. Branches parting.
The Green Man did not step into the clearing. He unfolded into it.
He seemed taller now, bark splitting along his limbs, revealing slick green muscle beneath. Moss slid from his shoulders like shedding skin. His face was not a face but a hollow arrangement of knotted vines and dark recesses, and within those recesses something glowed — faint and hungry.
Evan felt pressure behind his eyes.
Not a sound, but a thought.
You marked this place.
He realised then — the spiral wasn’t random. It mirrored the birthmark on his wrist, a faint swirl he’d always dismissed as coincidence.
The forest hadn’t called them.
It had been waiting.
The Green Man extended one branch-like arm. Vines uncoiled, reaching not for Evan’s body — but for the mark on his skin.
Lena grabbed him, pulling him back just as the vines struck the ground, splitting soil like probing fingers.
The symbol in the tree widened.
And from its centre, something blinked.
Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model
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