They understood then.The Green Man did not hunt.
He cultivated.
Evan stared at the oak and felt something ancient stirring in his chest. The spiral was not a warning — it was a sigil. A brand.
The mark on his wrist wasn’t coincidence.
It was inheritance.
The thought slipped into his mind like mist through cracks.
You are of us.
He staggered as memories that were not his own flickered through him — torches in a dark forest, villagers binding a creature of roots and sinew, sealing it to a tree with blood and symbols.
Not destroying it.
Containing it.
And binding a lineage to guard it.
Lena shook him. “Evan, stay with me!”
But his skin was splitting — not painfully, but opening in fine seams. Beneath it, green shimmered.
The Green Man approached, slower now. Reverent.
A father greeting a son.
Evan felt the forest differently — not hostile, not foreign. Alive. Connected. Every root a nerve. Every leaf a whisper.
The lost weren’t victims.
They were sustenance.
The forest had been dying.
And it needed a new keeper.
He saw the truth with terrible clarity.
The Green Man was not immortal.
It replaced itself.
And the seed had always been him.
Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model
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