What Waits in the Tree Line

Rowan had been told since childhood that the forest beyond the gate was a mouth.

It chewed through hunters, regurgitated bones, and swallowed prayers whole, but the priests still sent her into it with a blessed knife and a warning not to look anything in the eye.

On the night the moon turned white enough to silver the briars, she saw the wolf with human hands. It did not lunge. It only watched her bleed and said, in a voice that belonged in a ruined chapel, that she was walking toward the wrong monster.