1064: Story 1064: Forest of the Bleeding Sky 1064: Story 1064: Forest of the Bleeding Sky There was a time when Cradlepine Forest was green and kind.
When birdsong echoed in the canopy and foxes danced through fallen leaves.
That time is long gone.
Now, the trees groan.
The leaves weep.
And the sky bleeds.
It began when the sky turned red—not in sunset, but in saturation, like a wound stretched across the heavens.
The clouds pulsed like hearts.
Thunder groaned like a dying god.
The survivors who sought shelter beneath Cradlepine’s shadow were never seen again.
Except for Sister Naya.
She stumbled from the tree line at dusk, barefoot, blood-slick, eyes glowing like moons.
She whispered only one word before collapsing:
“It’s awake.”
Two nights prior, her scavenger group—seven strong—had ventured into the forest after hearing tales of fungal miracles blooming from corpses.
“Rebirth Spores,” the cultists called them.
They believed the forest had been touched by something beyond the veil, and that death itself had become fertile.
They were right.
In the red-lit woods, time unraveled.
The sky overhead seemed to bleed into the ground.
Every footstep was greeted with squelching moss.
Trees bore eyeless faces, mouths sewn shut with thornvines.
The air was heavy with spores that whispered.
One by one, the scavengers were changed.
Not killed.
Rewritten.
Bastian, their guide, was the first to fall.
He drank from a stream running red.
His body turned to bark, but his voice never stopped screaming.
Mila was taken by vines that slithered beneath her skin.
Her laughter echoed long after she vanished.
Jorge vanished mid-sentence.
The silence left behind rang louder than any scream.
Naya alone remained.
Or so it seemed.
In the center of Cradlepine, beneath a twisted tree that pulsed like a heart, she found it—the source.
A bleeding sky shard lodged in the forest floor.
A crystal grown from some realm of madness, its surface reflected not what was, but what should never be.
It showed Naya her own face—rotted, grinning, sainted.
The shard spoke.
“You are seed.
Let us bloom.”
She ran.
Ran blind, hallucinating roots beneath her skin, until she broke through the tree line and collapsed before the outer village.
What followed her was not the forest.
It was something deeper, using the forest as a shell.
Since that night, the sky over Cradlepine never returned to blue.
Rain falls in crimson droplets.
Animals refuse to enter.
The forest grows—inch by inch—toward the towns beyond.
And Naya?
She speaks no more.
She waters the earth with her blood.
And from her veins, mushrooms bloom.
They say the sky bleeds for what was buried in Cradlepine.
But others whisper:
The forest isn’t bleeding.
It’s birthing.