Count the Rings

Description

Deep in the old growth stands a single great tree, and somebody has been cutting one small notch into it for every life taken — hundreds of them, the oldest weathered gray, dating back further than the town itself.

When a hiker stumbles on the marker oak in the Sethwood, the county assumes graffiti until a forester counts the cuts and the carbon dates come back wrong by centuries. The notches are fresh and ancient both. And the newest one is still bleeding sap, cut sometime in the last week.

Ranger Halvard Stoss has walked these woods his whole life and never found the tree, though his grandfather warned him about it like a prayer. Now a string of disappearances tracks the trailheads nearest the oak, and the tally on the bark has started climbing faster — as if whoever keeps it is finally in a hurry.

Mossy, patient, and deeply unsettling, this is gothic horror rooted in a place that keeps its own count. Walton lets the forest do the breathing. The rasp of a blade on bark will get under your skin and stay.

Walk out to the tree. Count. See if you’re already on it.