VII. The Appetite

The Witchwoods guard something. Every account of the forest eventually arrives at this conclusion through different routes: the specific quality of the deeper parts of the forest, the sense that the drawing quality of the place is not random but directional, oriented toward something at the center rather than simply toward the idea of deeper. The Book of Unseen Currents describes a silent vow to guard the hidden light, and shield the dreams that darkness would extol. This is the language of purpose rather than accident.

What the forest guards, or what it guards against, or whether these are the same thing, the accounts do not agree on.

What they do agree on is the appetite. The Witchwoods consume, and the mechanism is the threshold-consensus itself. A shard realm organized around permeability between states makes things more permeable. Travelers who spend too long in the Witchwoods report afterward that something is different in themselves, that the boundary between their own waking and dreaming states has become more permeable, that they perceive things at the edge of consciousness that they did not perceive before and cannot stop perceiving now. The governing principle has acted on them: sustained exposure to a space organized around permeability erodes the boundaries within things as surely as it erodes the boundary between things. This is not always experienced as damage. Some describe it as the most clarifying thing that has ever happened to them. Others describe the difficulty of returning to a life organized around the assumption that waking and dreaming are distinct states, when they have spent enough time in the place where that assumption does not apply.

One account describes the experience in terms that I find the most precise of any I have encountered: the Witchwoods do not take anything from you that was not already in the process of changing. They accelerate what was already becoming. Whether what you were becoming was what you would have chosen to become is, the account notes, a question the forest does not ask and you may not have the presence of mind to ask yourself while you are in it.