Every forest has a mouth. Some learn to speak. Others learn to swallow.
The snow hadn't stopped in days.
It came in waves, like ash from an invisible fire, coating the pine needles in thick, suffocating silence. Elias Graye stood on the porch of the rotting cabin he called home, staring out at the trees he'd known his whole life, and realized he no longer recognized them.
The forest was too still.
No birds. No deer. Not even the whisper of wind through the upper branches. The world looked like it had been paused—frozen mid-thought, mid-breath. Even the air felt wrong. He could see it, thick and sluggish like smoke curling through water. It filled his lungs like syrup.
Behind him, his mother screamed.
A ragged, tearing scream, as if something were clawing its way up her throat from inside. Elias didn't flinch. He didn't rush to her side. He only gritted his teeth and turned away from the trees, stepping back into the house that stank of piss, blood, and boiled potatoes.
"It's crawling under my skin," she moaned from the bedroom, voice thick with phlegm. "It's back again. I can hear it chewing on the walls."
Elias walked past her door without a word.
He didn't need to look. He already knew what he'd see—his mother, curled in her nest of matted quilts, arms too thin, face too pale, hair like stringy cobwebs clinging to her scalp. Eyes white as milk, always searching corners that didn't exist.
He used to pity her.
Now he just feared whatever had taken her.
She hadn't always been like this. There was a time—years ago—when she'd been sharp, careful, always humming old songs while cooking elk stew or carving wood to sell in the winter markets. But something changed after the second snow last year.
She stopped sleeping. Stopped eating. Began murmuring to herself in strange patterns—pauses, stutters, syllables that didn't belong to any language Elias knew.
She claimed she could hear the forest whispering beneath the snow.
One morning, Elias found her outside, barefoot, kneeling in the frost with her head tilted at an unnatural angle, muttering to a knot in the base of a tree. Her fingers were inside it. Up to the knuckle.
"I can feel it breathing," she whispered, eyes wide. "There's a door in the roots."
At first, Elias thought she was senile. Then mad. Then maybe sick with some infection, some black rot eating her mind.
But now—after what he saw last night—he wasn't so sure.
He had been out chopping wood, about forty yards from the cabin, when his axe hit something wrong. It didn't ring like wood. It groaned.
He pulled back, puzzled, brushing aside snow and brittle pine needles—and saw it.
A circle.
Barely wider than a manhole, hidden beneath a tangle of roots and old bones. The trees around it leaned inwards like they were listening.
A perfect black hole in the earth.
No smell. No breeze. Just cold.
And sound. Not loud. Not clear. Just... movement.
Like someone dragging a sack of wet meat through broken glass—slow, deliberate, hungry.
Elias had stumbled back, heart pounding, not from fear but a deep, primal warning that throbbed through his teeth like rot. Something ancient. Animal. His hands bled from gripping the axe too tight.
But the hole... it called to him.
And when he looked up, the forest had changed.
He didn't remember walking home. Just the snow on his boots and the blood on his wrist where something had scratched him. His mother had been waiting at the window, smiling with all her teeth.
"All tunnels lead to the same mouth," she whispered.
That night, she slept with her eyes open.
Now, dawn came like a bruise.
Gray, bloated light spilled through the frost-covered windows. Elias dressed in silence, pulling on thick boots and a coat still damp from yesterday. He didn't know why he was going back to the hole.
Only that he had to.
He didn't take the axe this time. It felt useless. Whatever waited in that hole didn't fear tools made by men. He carried only a flashlight and the old hunting knife his father had left him, rusted but still sharp.
The tunnel was still there.
Even more open now—like the forest itself had exhaled during the night, widening the mouth, pulling aside roots like lips parting. It looked too deep for light to touch. The beam of his flashlight vanished into it after only a few feet.
He listened.
No wind. No birds.
Just the sound of wet breathing.
He climbed down.
The tunnel was wrong.
Too smooth, like flesh. The walls pulsed faintly. Wet veins ran along the sides. It reeked of blood and burned teeth. His boots squelched in something that clung and pulled like hungry mud.
Every step echoed—but not just behind him. It echoed in front of him. Mimicked.
Like something was copying his pace.
Following.
Or leading.
He lost track of time. Minutes? Hours?
The tunnel narrowed, then widened, then curved like intestines. It never felt natural. This wasn't earth. This wasn't geology. This was inside something.
He should've turned back. Should've run.
But then, the tunnel ended.
And the world changed.
He stepped out into a forest made of ash and bone.
Everything was gray. The trees were petrified, blackened trunks twisted like melted wax. Snow fell in slow spirals, thick and clotted. The sky above was empty—no sun, no moon, just static, like the flickering edge of a dream.
And the cold—it didn't sting.
It burned.
Elias dropped to his knees, gasping. His skin blistered in the open air. The breath he exhaled didn't vanish into steam—it froze midair and screamed.
Then he saw the figures.
Six of them.
Tall. Wrapped in robes made of stitched flesh. No faces. Just masks carved from human skulls, mouths agape in permanent agony. They didn't move. But they watched.
And between them, nailed to a dying tree, was something that used to be a man.
Skin stripped. Muscles exposed like raw meat. Mouth open, whispering without breath.
Elias stumbled forward, horrified, and heard it speak his name.
"Elias Graye… you finally came home."
Then the tree opened.
Not split. Not cracked. Opened. Like a ribcage unfolding. Inside, more of those things waited. Crawling things. Limbs bent the wrong way. Jaws that split to the stomach. Things that laughed in wet gurgles and chewed on human teeth.
A chorus began. Not in voices, but in the rattling of bones and the tearing of skin. They sang through their wounds. And the tree bled.
The nailed corpse thrashed once, then dissolved. Skin sloughed off like wet paper. Bone turned black. Maggots bloomed.
Elias screamed.
But the sound didn't leave his mouth. It came from the earth. It echoed out of the trees, from under the snow, from the hole that birthed him.
He turned and ran.
Back through the tunnel, through the soft walls and the veins that twitched when he passed. The thing that mimicked his steps no longer bothered to pretend. It galloped behind him, gurgling and giggling.
He felt claws in the dark. Felt something lick the back of his neck with a tongue like razors.
He burst out of the tunnel, gasping, bleeding, and covered in black mucus that steamed in the morning cold.
He lay there, on the snow, and sobbed.
And then he heard his mother humming.
From beneath the house.
A lullaby made of screams.