He’d only noticed a strange burl on the old white pine. Nothing alarming, nothing unusual for the deep backcountry where hundreds of such trees stood. He had no idea that this trunk hadn’t just grown that way by chance—that for decades, it had been concealing something the world was never supposed to see.
When the tree finally came down and the saw bit into its heartwood, the silence of the woods felt heavier than any sound. Inside, there was no rot, no hollow void—only the physical evidence of human choices that nature had tried to bury forever. In that moment, he realized: the forest wasn’t trying to scare people away; it was waiting for someone brave enough to uncover the truth.
A cold mountain mist drifted between the hemlocks, and the sky hung low over the ridges, pressing the forest into the earth. The woods began abruptly. Not with a sign or a warning, but with a sudden, heavy stillness.
Past the last stretch of broken asphalt, the road turned into a narrow dirt track, winding between slopes scarred by old landslides. In winter, it was a trap of ice and snow. In summer, it was a slurry of mud that swallowed tires and patience alike.
Beyond that lay territory that didn’t show up on standard GPS maps. The locals didn’t even have a name for it. On the company charts, it was just a set of coordinates—a high-difficulty timber tract.
In the logging company’s records, it was listed as a “restricted access sector.” Among the crew, they called it “The Quiet Patch.” Not because it was peaceful, but because it was the kind of place people didn’t like to talk about.
The trees grew too close together. Their canopies were so tightly knit that daylight barely reached the forest floor. Rocks, roots, and fallen logs were all draped in a thick, grayish-green moss, as if the forest were intentionally muffling its own colors.
Creeks appeared out of nowhere—thin, ice-cold ribbons of water. They vanished under layers of pine needles just as suddenly as they emerged…
