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.