Prologue — Whispers of the Greywood
There is no map for a wound like this. No rescue from a place that shouldn't exist.
They don't speak its true name anymore—not in whispers, not in folklore, not even in nightmares. The land once had a name, but the forest consumed it. What's left is only silence and snow, stitched together by trees that bleed black sap and bend without wind. They call it Greywood now. But that's a lie. It's not wood. It's not even alive. It's a maw. An ancient wound in the earth. Something older than time. Something that remembers being worshipped.
And it hungers for people.
Greywood has no boundaries, no rules. Its trees migrate at night. Its snow falls upward when it's hungry. And beneath its surface, there are tunnels—veins—that throb like muscle and pulse with things that never see the sun. There is no wildlife. No birdsong. Only the crunch of your boots and the slow, steady sound of something following you. Something patient. Smiling.
Once a year, it feeds. But sometimes, when it's starving, it sends out its whispers early.
And this year, it's starving.
---
They found the cabin weeks later—half-swallowed by frost, its front door hanging by one hinge, tapping rhythmically against the frame like a heartbeat. The snow around it was blackened, not from ash, but from something oil-thick and pulsing. Blood? Maybe. But it didn't freeze. And it stank of metal and rot, like spoiled meat wrapped in copper wire.
Inside, the walls were scratched with deep, frantic gouges—fingernails, they thought, or claws. Words scrawled in blood looped over the rotting ceiling: "THEY TOOK HIS SKIN."
No body. No remains.
But in the back room, near the hearth, they found what looked like a ribcage. Just the ribs. No spine. No organs. No flesh.
The stove was still warm.
And when they opened the pantry, they found eyes.
Seventeen of them.
All human. All fresh.
Each one was still blinking.
---
Elias valder was never the type to fear anything. He'd been a lumberjack since he was sixteen. Thick wrists, thicker shoulders. Quiet, steady, alone by choice. He liked the cold. Liked the dark. Said the trees spoke clearer when you listened without fear.
He built his own cabin just six miles from the edge of the northern Greywood—on land the locals wouldn't touch, even for free. They warned him about the soil, how nothing grows right. How the deer come out of the trees with their antlers on backwards and their tongues missing. He laughed it off. Said ghosts didn't scare him. Only men did.
But Elias didn't know what lived beneath Greywood.
Didn't know the forest has lungs.
Didn't know it breathes.
---
The last anyone saw of him, he was standing at the edge of the pine trail, holding his axe like a crucifix, staring into the trees. The snow had turned gray that day. Not dirty—gray, like wet ash. The sky was blank, featureless. Time didn't move right. The sun hovered in place for six hours, never rising, never falling.
He didn't speak. Just walked forward, one step at a time.
He left no trail behind him.
And then the wind changed.
They say when you're close enough to Greywood's hunger, the air gets thick with the smell of wet mouths. Not rot. Not sulfur. Just mouths. Open. Breathing. Wanting.
That was the last day anyone saw Elias Graye alive.
Or human.
---
Now, the locals speak of him in past tense. Not out of respect—but fear. They say his voice sometimes rides the wind during blizzards. Not crying for help—but calling you closer. His mother? Long dead. Burned herself alive in the cabin before Elias moved in, they say. Screamed about something scraping inside her bones. The coroner found bite marks inside her lungs.
People joke about it now. Call it a haunted forest. Call it campfire legend.
But every few winters, someone disappears.
And the forest grows a little closer to town.
The roads crack. The frost creeps under the doors. The dreams become darker.
And always, always the same voice in the night:
"Do you hear it now?"
---
Whispers of the Greywood begins not with a scream—but with the wet sound of an axe dropped in snow, and the trail of red that melts the cold like footsteps walking home.