1079: Story 1079: Thorns of the Mind 1079: Story 1079: Thorns of the Mind They say if you walk too long in the Briarshade Wood during a full moon, your thoughts become vines—twisting, tightening, flowering with memories that aren’t yours.
Dr.
Amaris Vell, a psychotherapist from the Sanctum Caravan, never believed the folklore.
She entered Briarshade armed with reason and a revolver, seeking the lost scouting party that disappeared two nights prior.
What she found was silence thick as sap, and thorns that whispered names only she knew.
The wood was alive, but not in any biological sense.
It thought.
It remembered.
It planted memories like seeds.
The deeper Amaris wandered, the more vivid her hallucinations became.
She saw her childhood home wrapped in creeping ivy.
Her brother’s laughter echoed through skeletal trees.
And yet… her brother had died in infancy.
She stopped to breathe, but even the air was barbed.
Every inhale carried fragments of lives that didn’t belong to her—prayers in forgotten tongues, sobs from faceless lovers, screams muffled by soil.
A figure emerged: a child with petals for eyes and vines woven into its skull.
It didn’t speak, but thorns bloomed around its feet wherever it walked.
“Who are you?” she asked.
The child blinked, and the thorns moved—inside her head.
Briarshade wasn’t cursed.
It was a living archive, a psionic thicket where memories were stored in botanical neurons.
Every soul that died in its embrace was rooted, their mind used to fertilize the next bloom.
The missing scouting party?
They were there—fused into the undergrowth, their thoughts still chattering behind bark and bramble.
Amaris tried to resist.
She whispered mantras.
Fired her revolver into the heart of a massive vinebeast wearing her mother’s voice.
But resistance made the thorns grow faster.
It wasn’t about physical entrapment.
This was conceptual entanglement.
To free herself, she would have to surrender everything that defined her.
She removed her glove and let the thorns pierce her hand.
Instead of pain, she felt clarity—blinding, kaleidoscopic, divine.
The woods offered her eternity, not death.
“Let go,” said the child.
And she almost did.
Almost.
But something ancient pulsed within her—a memory that wasn’t born from the forest’s root-web.
A voice from outside the eldritch veil.
Elias.
Her real brother.
Her real past.
With that anchor, she pulled her mind back from the blooming spiral.
She torched the nearest memory vine with a flare, the flames echoing through the woods like a scream underwater.
The child vanished.
The thoughts quieted.
The forest recoiled.
Amaris emerged from Briarshade with thorns still growing beneath her skin.
She can’t remember what color her eyes used to be.
Or whether she ever truly left.
She speaks in soft riddles now, warning others of the gardens that think and the roots that remember more than you ever lived.
And sometimes, just sometimes, petals bloom from her scalp when she dreams.