Rain had once carved paths through this place, but now the sky only hovered — swollen, stagnant, heavy with unwept tears. The air hung low and close, thick as infected breath. Mist clung to the ground like a second skin, curling and uncurling in slow, deliberate movements. No wind stirred. No bird dared cry. Above, the light fractured through the canopy not in beams but in bruises — sickly, yellowing, the colour of rotting marrow. The forest was a carcass wearing the illusion of life. Trees jutted from the ground like exposed ribs, twisted and calcified, their bark splitting like blistered skin. The earth beneath was soft, too soft — not soil, but meat. Spongy. Warm. Vines pulsed gently, rhythmically, crawling between rocks and roots like veins pumping dark ichor. Fungal blooms blossomed in the undergrowth, pale and bloated, weeping clear fluid that smelled faintly of vinegar and decay. The air pressed against the throat like fever-sweat, thick and stale, tasting of mould and blood. Even the silence had a pulse. There was a hollow in the forest — a clearing, raw and open, like an ulcer rotting through the body of the woods. Trees leaned in unnaturally around it, bowed not by wind but by grief, their branches gnarled into claws. At the centre, the grass had lost all colour. Beneath it, the soil swelled and sank with breath — slow, damp, deliberate. As if the forest had a lung, and this was its last infected gasp. Here, even the mist recoiled. Even the insects stayed away. And yet, she stood there. A child. A girl. Small, waterlogged, forgotten. Her limbs drooped at the joints, her knees grey with mud, her dress clinging to her like a moulting cocoon. Tangled in her matted hair, a pink ribbon still held its knot — faded and fraying, but there. A whisper of a life before. Her hands trembled as though they remembered warmth, though none remained. Her eyes — wide, glassy, hollow — seemed to plead for something. Shelter. Rescue. Forgiveness. She looked like someone to be saved. She looked human. But the forest does not share. It does not heal. It consumes. She shifted, slowly, and the trees shifted with her. Her breath came shallow and slow, then deepened — and with it, the ground beneath her pulsed in time. Roots uncoiled from the soil and wound themselves up her legs like tendrils of muscle, slick with sap. Moss slithered up her spine like mould crawling across damp lungs. Her skin began to change — paler, flaking, porous like bark just beginning to peel. The ribbon fell to the ground with a sigh, and the forest swallowed it without sound. Her eyes blinked once — and opened green. Not the green of nature, but of infection. Of rot. Of things that fester. Her chest rose and fell again, not with the rhythm of breath but with the rhythm of something else. Something ancient and parasitic. She had not been taken. She had been rewritten. Her voice, if it existed, was no longer her own. And the trees bowed. Around her, the forest exhaled — a long, low groan like air escaping a collapsing lung. The clearing darkened. The undergrowth shivered. The ground rippled faintly beneath her feet, then grew still. The girl did not move. She didn’t need to. She had become an extension of the forest’s sickness. A symptom in a dying body. A nerve ending twitching with unnatural life. And somewhere, deep within the dark belly of the woods, the forest smiled.