Chapter Text
The wood in winter flickers with an eerie bleak light. Shadows form faces in the fall of slanted sunlight on frost-gilded bark. The silence breeds echoes, fragments of song and laughter, purer and sweeter than anything human: or is it birdsong, the shivery trill of a solitary blackbird unseen in the leafless branches?
Ice rattles in the reeds, hides the sluggish black stream from sight, hides the secrets that lie beneath the water: coins, Coke cans, rosaries, single shoes, brooches, bones. Centuries lie hidden, dreaming, in the darkening wood.
But sometimes the wood gives something back ...