Chapter 1 – The Village at the Edge of the Trees
The road narrowed until it was nothing more than two ruts of mud and stone carved into the hillside. Beyond the glass of the car, pine trees pressed close, their trunks blackened by rain and age, their tops disappearing into low, swollen clouds. Lina turned down the radio; the music had begun to feel wrong in this place, too bright against the gloom.
“Check the map again,” Markus said from the driver’s seat. His knuckles were white where they clenched the steering wheel.
“We’re on the right road,” Lina replied, squinting at the screen. “Rothwald is about five kilometers ahead. If this thing hasn’t lost its mind.”
In the back seat, Jules leaned against the window, filming the landscape with her camera. “It’s perfect,” she whispered. “Like something out of a Grimm story. We’re going to get such good footage.”
Tom, next to her, snorted. “Right, until the witch eats us. Or until your followers get bored because nothing actually happens.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Jules shot back. “Haunted axe, cursed forest, disappearing woodcutters—it’s classic. Rural European horror. People love that.”
Lina glanced at her friend’s reflection in the glass. Jules’s excitement had a feverish edge to it. The trip had been her idea: a documentary for her small but growing channel, investigating obscure local legends around Europe. They’d done faded manors and abandoned sanatoriums already. Rothwald, and the Hollow Forest, were supposed to be the next step up.
Markus slowed as a cluster of houses came into view, huddled together like frightened animals at the forest’s edge. The village was older than any of them had expected: steep-roofed chalets with slate tiles, smoke curling from stone chimneys, narrow streets cobbled and uneven. A church bell sounded once, dull and heavy, though it was not the hour.
They parked in the small square near a fountain carved with saints whose faces had been worn smooth by centuries of rain.
“This is… atmospheric,” Tom said, shouldering his backpack. His attempt at a joke fell flat in the thick silence.
The villagers watched them from windows and doorways, eyes following the outsiders in their bright jackets and muddy hiking boots. Lina felt the weight of their gaze as they unloaded the car.
A woman in a dark wool coat approached them, her hair braided and pinned tightly at the back of her head. Her face was lined, her eyes a pale, cold blue. She moved with the slow certainty of someone who had long ago decided what she believed about the world and nothing could change it.
“You must be the ones who wrote to Father Georg,” she said in accented English. “The priest.”
“Yes,” Jules said quickly. “Jules Lavalle. We’re making a documentary about the legends here, about the forest. We have permission to stay at the rectory.”
The woman’s gaze flicked over them, lingering on the camera, the tripods, the cases of equipment.
“I am Marta,” she said. “I help Father Georg with the house. Come.”
As they followed her through the narrow streets, the air grew colder, damp seeping into their clothes. The forest loomed just beyond the last row of houses: a dark wall of trunks and shadow. Lina could hear it, or thought she could, a faint susurration like breath.
“Is it true?” Tom asked quietly, drawing level with Marta. “About the… axe?”
Marta’s jaw tightened. “There are many stories in Rothwald,” she said. “Some we tell. Some we don’t.”
“But people used to go into the forest to cut wood, right?” Jules persisted, filming Marta’s profile. “And some of them didn’t come back?”
Marta stopped so abruptly that Jules nearly walked into her. The older woman turned, her eyes suddenly hard.
“It is not a story for visitors,” she said. “You will stay in the rectory. You will film the village, if you must. But you will not go into the Hollow Forest.”
“Hollow Forest?” Markus repeated. “That’s what it’s called?”
“The old name,” Marta replied. “Our grandparents still used it. A forest is never truly empty, you see. When the trees become hollow, something else moves in.”
She began walking again before any of them could respond.
The rectory stood beside the small church, its stone walls thick and moss-covered. Father Georg, a stooped man with gentle eyes, greeted them at the door. He gave them hot soup and bread, listened to their explanations with patient silence, and finally said, “You may stay. But the forest is not a place for games.”
“We’re not here to mock anything,” Jules said. “We just want to document the legend. What people believe. That’s all.”
“Belief has weight,” the priest murmured. His gaze drifted to the dark line of trees beyond the window. “And some things in the Hollow Forest feed on it.”
That night, as the wind rattled the shutters and rain tapped on the glass, Lina lay awake listening to the murmur of the old building. The floorboards creaked as if under invisible footsteps. Somewhere, a clock ticked unevenly. Every now and then, she thought she heard the faint, distant thunk of metal on wood, rhythmic and slow, like the beating of a strange, cold heart.
She told herself it was only her imagination.
In the morning, she would discover that the marks on the rectory’s back door—deep, parallel grooves carved into the wood—had not been there the day before.
They looked like the work of an axe.
