Woods

As my fire continued to die it ceased to protect me from the shapes that had taken form within the surrounding fog. The firelight had served to illuminate the fog hanging in the air, and make my world a haze of white, hiding all but the strange sounds all around me.  Without it now, soon the white haze dwindled slowly away to grey, and within that the dark shapes returned.

I crept closer to the fading hearth and watched as the light glowing over the nearby grass slowly shrank. The fog hung watching indifferently as the wood in the fire burned lower and lower, and the shapes started appearing more and more within the moisture hanging on the air.

As they appeared darker and more distinct, their numbers also grew, and as my eyes whirled about me for an escape, they found none as the shapes increased and followed my movements. Their darkness soon spread and rose up higher over the fog, creating a blanket of night over my sight and a mimicking darkness crept into my heart as fear panged me.

I crouched low and looked around myself in a frenzy of fear as each shape finally grew clear into focus, stepping out of the fog one at a time. It was then that I distinctly made out the trees. The shapes that I thought to be stepping out of the fog at me were merely the stationary forest as the bank of fog had withdrawn from the area.

My senses soon returned to me and I stepped toward the trees and into their number, beginning to search around the forest floor for more fallen wood to start the fire going again. Reaching down, I grasped a small log only for another to fall neatly near my hand and startle me to jumping back for a moment.

I shook off the fright and leaned in to pick up the newly fallen log when I stopped myself immediately, realizing that this log was actually a foot of wood, extending upward into a humanoid being not only composed as if it were a tree, but facing me with a skull made of bark. Indeed, not only its face but its whole body, that of a tree and covered in as many styles of bark that I couldn’t even recognize each one.

Its featureless face seemed to gaze into me until my impulse to run finally made it to my feet, where I turned to flee but when I tried to raise my feet I found they were bound by roots, sending me to the ground. Down among the dirt, more roots grew around my body and limbs before swelling in size to restrain my movement, and the last thing I remember in my futile struggles was that bark man leaning down to me and his hand reaching toward me, narrowing into a thick branch with the popping sounds that trees make when strained, and the feeling of the rough bark forcing its way down my throat.