The Burning Roots

I think I started writing about the witch trees in the early 2000s. I am not sure what made me come up with them, the idea of trees that were a sort of witch’s coven but far more powerful

Far more dangerous.

They were creatures, not of earth but part of a larger, darker picture of a cosmos Man didn’t understand. The inspiration from Lovecraft is clear but I wasn’t looking to make a large sort of mythos of indifferent creature gods, but wanted to use that notion as a stepping stone to my one mythos. This wasn’t me doing my version of HPL but trying to build my own world in my own way. So in came the Sisters Six, six trees that influenced and ruled, in their way, over three towns, a region, and in ways, the world. I didn’t want to examine, as HPL seemed to, the notion that trust in an unseen higher power could be trust in something that didn’t even care you existed. My sisters were more akin to the devil, happy to do deals so long as they got what they wanted in the end.

As I wrote about them I started to consider an opposition because surely something must stand in opposition. Slowly that ‘other’ formed and took the shape of the Woodsman, a humanoid bigger and stronger than Man and which hated humans completely. The sisters do not hate humans, they just have their particular uses for them. They are useful though. The Woodsman has no use for them.

Not yet at least.

So I wrote about the trees in the woods and the promises they made and the monsters they birthed. I wrote about them for over a decade. Sometimes explicitly, sometimes just adding them to the background of stories but they were there. For me though, I always knew there’d be an end. There had to be an end. At least for me. Once there was an opposition to the Sisters, an opposing force, I knew I needed to have these two forces come together. I needed to tell that story. So slowly I started trying to turn the ship towards the horizon and towards the end, whatever that end would be.

Now that it’s come, that I have gone through and put together the stories that make up the heart of the of this mythos, and added it to a final story.

One last tale.

One story to tie it all together and to face the end.

The big challenge ahead is to revise THAT story, that novelette, and to make sure that now I have it all in mind, it reflects that whole picture.

And am I happy?

I think so.

I think I am.

I have some work to do, for sure, but I think it ends up where it should. I think the end is satisfying.

Yeah, I dig it.

It’s gonna be a pretty neat book, when it’s finally together. A story about greed, pain, loss, sacrifice, and of the darkest places of the woods and the things that live there. I am definitely excited to get it put to bed.

I wrote a last story the other day that reflects the opposition, that gets into the mind of a monster.

I’ll leave with a sample of that story and hope that you’ll want to see what the whole work looks like when it hits later this year.

So, I made sure to leave my own sacrifice to the Great Black.

I hewed them asunder with my axe, the blade thirsty, so thirsty for blood, that I had no choice but to oblige. When I was done, I took the heads of the dead and used them as brushes to paint the entirety of the hut red, as a warning.

Stay away.

Keep back.

The flesh I used to cover the inner walls.

The bones built my throne.

The denuded skulls became the path to greet me.

Oh, if they would make me a god then I would make myself the most awesome and horrible god of them all.

When I was done, the small clearing near a wide river where they had built their temple stunk like their human inferno.

…c…