My breath came in short, ragged gasps as I stood before the forest.
The abyssal trees loomed ahead, their twisted branches reaching skyward like skeletal hands grasping for the heavens.
But what truly seized me,
Ba-dump!
Ba-dump!
Tightening my chest and threatening to crush my resolve, wasn't the shadows pooling around the roots or the stifling quiet that swallowed the horizon.
Ba-dump!
Ba-dump!
It was the bodies- dozens, no, hundreds, perhaps thousands- hanging lifelessly from gnarled boughs. Skeletal, shriveled firms swayed gently, their hollow sockets staring into the endless void.
The sheer scale of it left my mind reeling.
Just how many lives had been claimed to create this grotesque display of death?
Ba-dump!
Ba-dump!
