The Ritual

by Adam L.G. Nevill

You didn’t need to be sentient out here, just afraid all the time and quick to act when the world suddenly felt wrong around you; too still, too easy. That’s when you died out here.

The boughs and leaves of its territory shuddered, marshy surfaces quivered, and the dank and dripping vales held their breath before its arrival.

After all of that development and growing and cultivating and caution and survivable self-destruction and failure and regeneration and struggling and coping, they had just walked through the wrong bunch of bloody trees. And that was that.

There was simply no preparation in life for the determined madness of others.