#intrepidtransit

I was twenty-something, half-feral and fluorescent with jet lag, on a working-holiday visa that had turned into a pilgrimage of accident. London had been grey noise and lager light, so I took a train north, chasing a rumour of silence.

The carriage hissed through fir and granite. We passed a station called Hel, which felt like a private joke from the gods of marketing. The air beyond the window looked distilled as if someone had taken all the colour out of existence and left only its soul. I disembarked at Foss, a name that sounded like the hiss of falling water, or a sigh through teeth.

There was almost nothing: a café, a rack of hire-bikes, one postal worker winding down the road on a small red motorbike, Hermes in high-vis.

I started along a path that slipped into the forest, the way a thought slips into dream.

At first it was the kind of silence that’s polite. Then it thickened and it began to breathe. Somewhere in the canopy, magpies rearranged the syntax of the day. And then fear, that clean, ancient fear that arrives when you realise the world is vast and doesn’t particularly care if you exist. I sat down on a rock to negotiate with my nerves.

That’s when I heard them.

Not 'heard' like sound more like registered the trees. They were speaking, not in Norwegian or English or even metaphor, but in vibration.

The trunks were resonating with a slow, sap-heavy grammar. I couldn’t translate it, but it went straight into the bloodstream. It said something like: You are temporary. Be grateful. Keep still.

For a moment I thought of black metal, the corpse-painted priests of distortion, and understood they were only trying to imitate this: the forest screaming its own liturgy of life and rot.

The voice of the land was both terrifying and tender, like being stared at by eternity.

When the spell broke, I walked back toward the station, carrying silence like contraband.

The café’s lights flickered on, and Logos, the ordinary, measurable world resumed its paperwork.