January 3, 2026

Dr. Maren Thorne wasn’t running from anything. That’s what she told herself when she took the research post in the Huron Barrens—a remote tract of frostbitten Canadian wilderness where the trees stood too close together and the wind made sounds like whimpering things.

A fellowship grant from the Earth Legacy Foundation. Six weeks alone. Studying what local forestry called “non-categorized organic resurgence” but what she quickly realized were plants that should not be here. Should not be.

The flora she documented on day three didn’t match any North American taxonomy. The leaves had no veins. The vines glistened in the cold as if slick with oil. They grew in a radial pattern around something she never saw—something buried under black, loamy soil that stank of rot even when frozen. And they moved. Not in the wind. They moved when she looked away.

By the second week, the dreams began. Wet and green. She would wake with dirt under her fingernails and the scent of bark in her hair, though the cabin was sealed tight. In sleep, she saw vines opening like mouths. She saw herself kneeling, offering up her tongue to something vast and unseen in the canopy.

Her field notes shifted. The handwriting at first: sloppier, more rushed. Then characters that didn’t resemble any alphabet. Glyphs. Tendrils of thought that didn’t start in her brain but grew there. She could feel them. Roots threading down through her spine. Pollinating her nightmares.

Maren recorded herself one night, to verify the dreams were only that. In the playback, she did not speak—but something else did. A low, whispering hum, like wind through hollow reeds, rose between the static. And beneath that, in her voice but not her, came a lullaby in no known language. When she played the file backward, it said:

“The seed is awake in you. Soon the forest will wear your skin.”

Her instruments began to fail. Batteries dead within minutes. Soil samples turned to ash in containment. The last photo she took of the vine cluster was pure black, except for her own pale face, peering in from the edge of the frame, eyes open too wide, mouth sealed by a green handprint.

Maren wrote one final journal entry:

“I think I’ve become a translator. Or a spore. I’m not sure which. But they dream through me now. I’m learning to bloom.”

She was never recovered. Only her equipment, carefully stacked at the edge of the clearing. Her laptop was open, its screen showing an interface she never installed—a pulsing, green waveform in the shape of a root system, branching ever outward.

Local rescue teams don’t go near that area anymore. They say the dreams started coming home with them. And if you sleep too close to the vines, you’ll wake with the whisper in your head:

“Grow with us.”