By Francesc Borrull · October 20, 2025

He was a creature of the forest—a boy who knew its veins and murmurs better than any map or man. His name was Elias, and the woods had raised him as one of their own. He moved not by sight, but by the scent of moss after rain, the language of branches swaying above him, and the soft hush of leaf against leaf. To him, the forest was not a place; it was a pulse.

One morning, as the first blush of dawn stretched across the canopy, Elias noticed something that did not belong. Far off, through the weave of trees, a flicker pulsed—a light not of the sun or any fire he knew. It wasn’t steady like a lantern but shivered with a strange blue breath, as if the night itself were exhaling its last secret. Curiosity kindled and wary, he followed.

The deeper he went, the less the forest sounded like itself. No birds. No wind. Even his own footsteps seemed to hesitate. The light grew sharper, more deliberate, until it led him to a clearing—a circle of towering oaks, their trunks blackened with age, encircling a low stone altar. Upon it, a dozen candles burned in exact formation, their flames leaning in the same direction, as though listening.

Before them stood a man cloaked in shadow. His hood concealed all but the slow rhythm of his breath. He was chanting in a language that felt older than the roots beneath Elias’s feet. The sound didn’t merely fill the air; it entered him—vibrating the marrow in his bones, bending thought and will toward the rhythm of its cadence. The earth seemed to listen, then to answer.

A tremor rippled through the clearing. The trees groaned, and their branches writhed like startled serpents. Elias staggered backward. The ground beneath him didn’t just crumble—it dissolved, as though the world had forgotten to hold him. He was unstitched from everything he knew, his scream swallowed by a velvet black that had no bottom.

Then, through the rushing dark, a burst of light—blinding, pure, alive—split the void. Out of it came a woman, descending like a comet, her hair fanned behind her in a pale halo. Her arms reached out, and when she caught him, her touch was impossibly cool, like water drawn from a mountain spring. The fall stopped. The darkness cracked apart.

They rose, borne upward on the brilliance that had swallowed the pit. The forest spun below them—candles snuffed, shadows scattered, the hooded man gone as though he had never existed. When Elias blinked again, he was standing in a meadow rimmed with wildflowers, the air bright with the hum of bees. The woman was no longer there.

He turned, breathless. The forest was behind him, dense and silent, but ahead the land opened wide—a cliff’s edge overlooking an endless, trembling sea. The morning sun shimmered across the water, each wave a mirror flashing something he could not name.

Elias stepped closer to the edge. The wind from the ocean pressed against him, tasting of salt and distance. He lifted his hand and caught the breeze, feeling the faint scent of pine and smoke still clinging to his skin—a trace of what he had faced, and what had faced him.

He was no longer the boy who belonged to the forest.
But the forest—its danger, its darkness, its deliverance—belonged to him now.

And as he gazed toward the horizon, he understood: every sanctuary begins where fear ends.

© Francesc Borrull, 2024-2025