price please domesticate me

That was the problem. Not the roots, not the stories. Hell, not even the trees, mostly. It was the goddamn route. Sure, the settlement's stores would survive another month, maybe two. But Dornau had medicine. They had fuel, working solar panels that they were willing to trade. If the road was gone, someone needed to find another way through. And unfortunately, that someone was apparently you.

The head of this makeshift council suddenly slid a folder across the table in your direction, and you stared at it before flicking your eyes to her, then back at the folder.

"No."

"An excellent opening argument," she said.

"-It's a complete argument."

"You haven't even opened it, I suggest you do."

"I don't need to." A few people around the table snorted, all except her.

"The route needs to be surveyed."

"Then survey it."

"I haven't left the walls in six months."

"That sounds like a you problem."

A twitch appeared near her eye at your stubborn rebuttal. Progress, at least you assumed as much.

"You know the road network better than anyone here."

"Yeah, but only because I drove it."

"See? That’s exactly why you’ve been selec-”

"-Before the world got eaten."

The silence that followed left a thickness in your throat that pulled an unease out of everyone. But nobody corrected you, no one dared encroached on that. Besides, the world hadn't technically been eaten, that was simply the easiest way to describe it.

One year ago there had been highways. Cities full of life and people. Cities with streetlights, cell towers… Now there was mostly the Rotwood and the far and few settlements that dotted the landscape. No one understood exactly how it had happened, just that one day people were discussing rising food costs and failing infrastructure, and a few months later, roots were bursting through apartment floors in the middle of the night. The forest hasn’t stopped growing since.

The woman folded her arms across her chest and looked down her nose at you, "You won't be alone, at least."

You immediately distrusted the tone of her voice and narrowed your eyes at her, "Who?"

She smiled, it was a poor attempt at one, but a smile nonetheless. The kind people used when the answer was going to make your day worse.

"König."

The room went quiet and your stomach dropped.

"Oh."

"That's usually the response." Arguing was no use here. You pulled the folder toward you and opened it to find scraps of map, mostly. A handwritten list of what Dornau had last offered in trade and a photograph of the old western road that had been taken from the makeshift-watchtower around four months ago. They acted as if the road still looked the same, and you stared at it for a second before flipping it face-down. You were to accept that you’d been ‘unanimously selected’ to pack your shit and find a way back to Dornau. They called it a mission, a survey. They called it, with straight faces, an ‘opportunity’. Nobody in that room said the word ‘expendable,’ but it sat at the table with you anyway, weighing your stomach down like lead. “You leave at dawn.” “Fine.” •·················•·················•

You zipped your rucksack shut and felt the tension in your thighs as you resist the urge to launch the whole bag across the room and into the wall. ‘Bullshit’, you thought, and then said it out loud. “Bullshit… absolute bullshit.” Your breath plumed in the cool morning air and the echo you gave yourself was a comfort in the weighted tension that dawn gave. But the curse gave no relief as the clock ticked the seconds away, night melting into day. You stood from your bunk and drug the bag closer before shouldering it, shucking the weight of the pack from shoulder to shoulder, feeling the ache set into the hinge of your arm and the base of your neck before you’d even stepped a foot outside. You caught a glimpse of yourself in the partially-broken mirror near the front door, taking note of yourself: jaw set and chin lifted. A facade of bravery that you’d have to carry the weight of the moment you walked out. Once outside, every neighbor, every 'friend' and 'foe' alike kept their eyes cast to the ground. You told yourself it didn't matter, and maybe it didn't.. Someone near the gate cleared their throat and looked away before you could catch their eye, and you felt something ugly rise in your chest - gratitude, maybe, that no one was watching, or something closer to its opposite. You'd heard the stories. Seen the way people came back unlike themselves only to disappear nights later. Your feet kept moving anyway, which was either courage or just the absence of a better option, until your eyes landed on him. He was unmistakable. Even hunched over a pack in the early morning fog, he had the kind of size that made the space around him feel borrowed. Dressed in fatigues that had been hand-repaired several times over and a worn balaclava that left him all but featureless aside from those ocean eyes that carried night after night of sleeplessness. You could only wonder how he fit through the doors in the settlement and whether or not Waldheim even had a bed for someone like him. And as you approached, he regarded you as one might a fish left floundering on a riverbank: not unkindly, but with a private amusement that suggested he wasn't entirely surprised. “Take off your rucksack. Show me your things.”

You pulled the ruck from your shoulders without a word and set it down, unzipping it and stepping back. He crouched and went through it with gloved hands - flashlight, water filter, purification tablets, field knife, antiseptic, the maps, compass, cordage, two pairs of socks, insect repellant, bandages. He turned the last of your coffee over once in his palm before setting it back. The MRE’s he stacked to one side were reorganized, then he packed it all back the way he'd found it and stood, and his eyes went to the wall of trees that once was the western road.

"The woods aren't like before," he said. "Growing fast again, ja? Must be angry."

You waited, but that was all he gave you before the gate opened. One guard spat over his boot and nodded to you, the motion dry and terminal and the other simply just opened the gate, muttering a quick ‘good luck’ under his breath. And before you knew it, the gate was already swinging closed behind you, the clang of the latch echoing like a starter’s pistol, and König was walking forward with a stride that said the only way out of this was through. You hesitated a beat, half expecting him to look back, acknowledge you as a teammate, or at least a grunt of a goodbye at the wall, but he was all business, a silhouette bulking rapidly into the dark edge of the tree line.

You hustled to catch up, toes of your boot meeting and catching the roots that buckled the tarmac underfoot, making each step a negotiation with your ankles, but your mind was already outpacing your body, running through every rumor, every apocryphal tale of the Rotwood. All of them ended with someone gone, or changed, or worse. The trees here looked as if they’d been poured out of the sky: too thick, too tall, packed side by side so tightly in some spaces that you couldn’t throw a stick between them. You imagined the old road still running underneath, a black ribbon suffocating in ancient roots, the last gasp of the old way dying beneath.

König didn’t pause at the treeline; he simply slipped through the gap between two peat-colored trunks and vanished, the camouflage of his fatigues merging instantly with the ambiguous dark. You followed, the air instantly shifting from needle-toothed morning cold to a humid petrichor-heavy air that made the hairs on your neck stand up. The sounds changed, too. Gone were the familiar sounds of the settlement, the squabbling chickens, the diesel cough of generators, the low chatter of old neighbors.. They were all severed in an instant. In their place rose a breathing, rustling quiet, thick with the scent of wet earth and things growing too fast. Every leaf held a separate tension; every shadow seemed to pulse with a slow, deliberate malice. “H-Hey! Wait up!” Your voice went nowhere, immediately suffocated in the churned loam and thunderous silence pressing up from the roots below. The sound of your call was devoured before it had traveled a hand’s length in front of your face, as if the trees themselves had breathed it in, tasted your attempt at intrusion, and dismissed it. König didn’t slow but rotated his head a fraction, giving you a warning in the form of a single, stern glance - something behind the eyes that said, ‘If you keep making noise, one of us is not coming back.’ You swallowed the rest of your shout and kept your eyes low, pace doubled to close the gap without incident. The lesson was already written: in the Rotwood, only an idiot announced themselves. Idiots and inhabitants, anyways. You tailed him deeper, yours ears pricked for the unnatural stillness. Birds did not sing, there were no insect sounds, no wind. After twenty, thirty minutes, you realized you’d stopped keeping track of time, or distance, or cardinal direction for that matter. Maybe König could navigate, maybe not. You were already disoriented, uncertain if you’d gone a hundred meters or over a kilometer. The trunks were packed so tight that the light above was trapped in a permanent twilight, the colors shifting between bloody brown and putrefied gold as leaves above caught stray rays and filtered them through furious chlorophyll. Then there was a sudden rustling to your left. You jerked, your hand moving to the hilt of your knife before you even realized it and König simply kept walking. You want to say his name, but the syllables won’t even form on your tongue. Instead, you pivot just enough to put the noise at your twelve and narrow your eyes, squinting through the tight, oily filament of light that seeps in sideways. On the surface, nothing stirs: the trunks are massive, their bark both old and new and deeply fissured, and the ground is a quilt of last year’s leaf mold and spongy peat, all twined together with roots both hair-fine and thick as sewer pipes. But you know something is there; you heard it, felt it down in the cut where the animal-self resides.

Then the movement comes again, barely more than a twitch, and your eyes catch the suggestion of motion above shoulder height. In another life, in another world, you’d have said it was wind, a branch shifting. Instead, it is something darker: a tremble in the air itself, a sense of gaze and presence so complete you nearly drop into a crouch out of instinct to make yourself smaller. You fumble for the logic of it, for a way to explain what you’re seeing - branches, yes, but not branches, not alive, more like the memory of limbs reaching for light that isn’t here - and you take a slow step back, your heel sinking into mud.

The silence pushes in and swallows whatever breath, whatever words you’d planned - only to be broken once more. A familiar voice slipped into the hum and hit the soft spot beneath your ribs. “You always did run toward the wrong things, didn’t you?” Just the shape of the words, not the sound - like a sentence spoken in a dream, perfectly familiar, impossible to recall. The accent, the rhythm, the.. everything.. right up until it snapped, shredded, and was cut off by the wall of a body, the literal meat of König, crowding out sensation. His gloved hand clamped around your bicep with careful force, more restraint than threat, more warning than comfort.

He studied your face with a peculiar totality, as if trying to count every beat of terror and outrage in your skin. Then he made a barely audible click in his throat and jerked his chin forward and up - eyes on the woods, not on you. It was his soldier’s way of saying ‘move’, you think. You let yourself be pulled along, the mud beneath your boots squelching in subtle protest, and you tried to shake the voice from the soft meat of your memory.

But it lingered.

You walked with König, feeling his stride like a metronome set to military time, but your mind kept snagging on the echo of that whisper. Was it memory? Hallucination? You’d been told the Rotwood played tricks, sure. But this was something else. It clawed at you, the near-certainty that someone had spoken directly into the labyrinth of your mind, twisting it into a smaller, meaner shape. The inflection, the cadence, the way it flicked the tip of each word - all of it sewn into your brain by years of dull familiarity. A simulacrum with just enough longing in the vowels to excavate marrow-deep ache. You were so sure it must have been real that you turned, slow as prey, expecting to find the source wearing a face or a body, but the only thing that met your eyes was the familiar - or not so familiar - sight of the Rotwood. Eventually König released your arm and began forward once more, his bulk carving through the trees as if expecting them to part for him. You wanted to grab him, to scream his name and demand that he explain why the forest could speak your memories into a false existence, but you settled for stumbling after him, jaw clenched tight. The roots shifted underfoot, bulging upward like someone tugged a rope, and you tripped and fell, palm-first, and the taste of leaf mold and something bitter filled your mouth. You pushed up into a squat, spit, and choked on the realization that the ground itself was warm and swore that the roots where you’d fallen pulsated in slow, deliberate waves. Almost reminiscent of an animal breathing. You wiped your hand on the thigh of your pants, but the heat stayed with you, crawling up your wrist toward your elbow. König turned at the sounds of your distress, his head cocking as if triangulating the exact flavor of your fear. And in two strides he was on you. "Bist du noch ganz dicht?" Not a hiss, something worse, something pressed flat and airless, like the way you speak when raising your voice would kill you both. He hauled you upright by the arm. "You bleed all over the silence." His thumb dug into the meat of your bicep once, a period at the end of a sentence. "That is what it wants." The accent hit the words like a blade finding the same notch twice.

You gave a soft whine at the pain of his grip and he released you, and, for an instant, you saw something behind his balaclava not entirely made of human concern: a sweep of calculation, something like regret, then he walked ahead. You spat again and made yourself match his pace. You tried not to think about the heat crawling up your veins, but the feeling pressed on your nerves, body itching as if the root’s warmth had left eggs in your skin.

The going only got meaner from there. •·················•·················• You hated the way your knees ached; hated more that the way the old asphalt clung to the edge of your memory but not your feet. Hours bled into each other, the focus of your entire being reduced to not tripping, not losing König’s bobbing head, not screaming when the trees grew so close you had to slide between them sideways, breathing bark and the rot-sweet perfume of sap. It felt as if every dozen meters, the forest changed its mind about what it wanted to be: from humid, fungused tunnels of collapsed branches to wide clearings hung with veils of mist and the latticed structure of vines that seemed to congregate around old human structures. Sunlight faded, or the Rotwood simply denied it, until you were moving blind at times, only able to rely on the flashlights the two of you had brought in.

A thought prodded your memory, remembering that you’d read somewhere that in deep forests, your senses lose calibration. That, deprived of true sound and true light, the mind starts to mistake direction, time, even your own position in the world. By the time König halted, you could not have said whether it was morning or nearly dusk, only that the hunger in your gut had bloomed into a second, more bestial self when he suddenly decided to put a hand back to halt you. König tilted his head, cocking an ear toward the hush ahead. Then with all the care of an animal deciding whether to trot out onto the ice, he peeled his pack off, signaled for silence, and squatted. The gesture was clear: Stay put. Watch. Wait.

You went to the ground beside him, your breath a bitter cloud stifled against the crook of your elbow, and peered into the low gloom. At first, only layers of bark and root, all depth and no movement. König’s hand slid back and snared your wrist, pressing your palm flat to the earth. At first, you recoiled, then felt it: a faint thump, not unlike the rhythm of a heart, muffled but distinct. Then a hum, subtle, through the loam. König’s head swiveled, and he put his lips almost to your ear: “Down.”

You pressed yourself prone, cheek against black soil, and the taste of the earth, iron and acid, filled your jaw. Somewhere ahead, the root-heartbeat deepened and stretched, and then something moved.

Across the clearing, it appeared; a thing like a deer, but taller, gaunter. The shape did not fit your standard Stag, too tall, too thin, a rack of antlers blooming from the head like an explosion of root and bone. You braced yourself for an animal, then for the ruined parody of the thing it used to be.

But even with all the warnings, the stories and your own instinctual dread, you were not prepared for the way it moved. The animal, if it was still an animal, limped and swayed, its limbs impossibly long, its body a coalescence of maggoty sinew and rot-laced fur that barely held together. Its ribs pinched the skin into lacy webs, and parts of its hide flaked off, revealing a thick, twisted ichor that oozed between exposed vertebrae. The antlers were wider than your own arm span, not antler at all but fused fibers and twisted root that still bled, the velvet hanging like the gored flesh of a fresh kill. Its jaw worked side to side as it walked, broken, unhinged and empty but for splinters of bark, and what should have been eyes were simply wet holes, raw and gaping. Its hooves didn’t make a sound aside from the vibrational hum that vibrated through the ground. It stepped and paused, nostrils flaring as if sifting the world for molecules of you. A rank dread peeled your ribs apart, like the memory of a belt whipping across your back - a childish, primal humiliation. If you could have stopped your own heart, you would have, for fear the thing might taste it. But you didn’t have time to process the impossible thing you were seeing before a fist of stench slammed into your face. It was raw, animal, but abraded through the filter of organic rot and ammonia that only comes from something that should never have lived. König’s hand was at your mouth before your diaphragm could choose between retching and screaming, gloved fingers crushing you silent as the Stag’s head snapped up, the antlers spidering a shadow across the ground. Its gaze was a searchlight, and though its face had no eyes, you felt it burn through the marrow of your bones with the precision of an autopsy scalpel.

Then it made a sound, nothing like that of a standard deer, no, it was a vocalization torn apart by the half-life of its corrupted throat. A sickening, liquid wheeze like wet leaves sucked through a drain, like the sound organs make when spilled from a gutted animal. The noise struck you as exactly what the end of the world would sound like if it had a mouth. König’s grip tightened and suddenly, every muscle in your body became static, waiting for the engine of horror to lurch or charge. Instead, the thing simply inhaled. If air were currency, this was theft; it flickered its nostrils so violently the skin at the bridge tore further, splitting wide enough to weep a line of coagulated blood.

And then it did something you could not have prepared for: it reared, it’s rear legs splintering off blunt bone where hoof met hock, and twisted its entire being toward the darkened woods. The backward articulation of its legs was so sharp and abrupt that even König flinched, and you bit your own tongue in the effort not to scream. An entire bouquet of sick sweetness and ammonia lathered your throat and König’s hand, and for a moment you thought you’d black out. The Stag was gone. One heartbeat it was there, the next, it had vanished into the thick behind a maze of branches.

You waited. König waited. The only evidence that anything had happened at all was the stench burning the insides of your nostrils, and the black blood-like resin that had spilled from the roots where the Stag’s hooves buckled the ground. Only when König finally released his hand did you realize you’d been holding your breath for at least a count of thirty. Your jaw ached from the pressure, and you spat again, except this time it was blood, the copper tang mixing with the aftertaste of decay. You didn’t even register the pain. “It did not scent us as prey,” König said, and the way he said it, low, almost to himself, made it worse. “This is.. strange..” Your body returned to you in a series of violent failures: the coppery slick flood under your tongue, the tremor that began deep in your chest and seized your limbs until your hands were shaking so badly you couldn’t have held a bullet. Your breath hitched and caught, a wet, broken sound like a damaged engine refusing to turn over. You ground your knuckles into the dirt, trying to press the memory out through your bones, to force yourself back into the shape of a person who hadn’t witnessed the world peel back to show its rotting heart.. But König was already methodically searching the treetops. “We stop here tonight,” he stated, his voice flat, and he did not turn toward you again. And that was alright with you.