Page 21 of Grizzly's Grump
My skin crawls, and the hair on the back of my neck rises. Something is different. The ground beneath me seems to hum. Not loud—but low and steady, like a faraway engine idling beneath the earth.
Then, the world snaps into motion.
The hush shatters—an invisible thread pulled too tight finally snapping. A sudden crackle of energy slices through the air, a sharp pop that lifts the tiny hairs on my arms. Light blooms at the base of a nearby tree—silver and otherworldly—spreading outward like fire-lit roots, threading across the forest floor in glowing veins.
Before I can move, a tendril of strange light lashes out, curling around my clogs with impossible precision. Heat trails behind it—like molten silk gliding over skin—as another filament winds upward, brushing my calves. The hum beneath my feet deepens, thrumming through bone and blood, stirring memories I don’t recognize and meanings I can’t quite name. I inhale sharply; the air tastes of lightning and old secrets.
Then the forest blinks. Light blooms outward in rippling waves, not fire, but something alive—tendrils unfurling in slow, hypnotic motion. One slips toward me, edged in blue, wrapping tight before I can react. Another follows, its warmth climbing higher.
The sensation isn’t painful. It pulses with something ancient and alive, something borrowed from a world that doesn’t follow the rules of this one. It glides over my skin like heat rising off pavement, buzzing in my veins like half-remembered music.
A jolt hits my vision, sudden and clean—the forest disappears, not dimmed but erased, like someone wiped the slate blank. For a suspended heartbeat, everything vanishes: sound, breath, time. Then silence roars back in, deafening and absolute. The emptiness it leaves behind scrapes hollow through my chest, as though I’ve lost something vital I never realized I held.
I open my mouth, but no sound escapes. My throat locks, seized by the thick, electric air pressing down on me. Each breath comes slow and shallow, the air dense with energy and pressure. It feels like the atmosphere itself is waiting—tense and tight—poised for something I can’t see but feel pressing in from all sides.
The forest lurches sideways, and then I’m weightless, spiraling into the dark... I don’t remember hitting the ground.
But in that weightless moment, something flashes across my mind—a woman I’ve never seen before, standing barefoot in a circle of stones, arms raised to the sky. A bear in silhouette. Glowing red moss spiraling around her feet. My name—whispered, stretched, and doubled over itself like an echo in water. And then… silence.
I startle awake, flat on my back, my vision slowly sharpening on the stars that glitter through a tear in the treetop canopy.
For a moment, I lay there in stunned silence, my limbs heavy and scattered, as if someone had dropped me from a greatheight and my body is still catching up. The sky overhead is too clear, too still, and the forest around me holds its breath. I don’t remember falling; however, my spine aches, my palms are scraped, and the ghost of something too big to name makes every muscle hum. The scent of moss, damp bark, and ozone clings to me, strange and too sharp in my nostrils. What just happened? And why does it feel like the forest itself is holding me in place, waiting for me to remember?
What the hell just happened?
I sit up slowly, clutching my head as the world tilts. My flashlight is still beside me, but the batteries are dead. My phone is back at the food truck. Of course.
My legs tingle, half-asleep and sore. I flex my fingers, testing for injury. Nothing broken. But I feel... displaced. Like the ground isn’t quite level, like my body got rewired while I was out. My bones tingle with something unfamiliar, as if someone tuned me to a different frequency.
And threading through it all, a murmur of fear I refuse to acknowledge—too quiet to scream, too deep to ignore. It's the kind that knots in your belly and waits, patient and unyielding, for the moment you finally admit it was always there.
I push to my feet, swaying slightly. The world around me looks the same, but I don’t feel the same. There’s a hum beneath my skin, as if the forest left its fingerprint on me. The leaves glisten strangely in the moonlight, and I swear the shadows are heavier than before—thicker, almost pulsing.
I reach for the dead flashlight, tuck it into my hoodie pocket, and begin the slow walk back to the food truck. But nothing feels certain anymore—not the direction, not my footing, not even the distance between one tree and the next.
The clearing is quiet. Too quiet.
And then I hear it. Something moving. A soft rustle of underbrush and the unmistakable sound of breath—not mine—close and steady.
I turn my head slowly, breath tangled in my chest. Between the trees, two glowing eyes blink once—calm, unhurried—as if they've been watching me for longer than I realize. They don’t glow red or flash with menace. They're a molten amber, steady and ancient, locked onto mine across the hush of the clearing.
The shape behind them remains mostly hidden, but the way the shadows bend tells me it’s big. Wild. Not just animals, but something more. Something that defies every field guide I’ve ever studied—an outline I can’t classify, a presence that doesn’t fit the rules of nature.
I swallow hard, heart hammering, caught between the primal urge to flee and a fascination I can’t shake.
I go still.
A shape—massive, furred, silent—steps just far enough from the shadows to make my skin prickle. Any light from the firepit that might have existed doesn’t reach this far, but moonlight skims the outline of thick fur drawn taut over sinuous muscle. Not a bear. Not a wolf. Not anything catalogued in any wilderness reference I’ve seen. Its movements are too fluid, its stillness too complete.
Its presence hums like a low current surging through my system, powerful and deliberate. It doesn't growl or advance, just stands there, carved from night and shadow, as if it's weighing me. Judging. Waiting for something I'm not sure I can give... just watching.
My breath comes in shallow pulls, sharp and fast, but something deeper inside me—something older—goes still. I should be terrified. I should turn and run without looking back. Instead, there's this strange calm, like my body recognizessomething my mind hasn’t caught up to yet. Like I’m not in danger.
I blink, and it’s gone.
No sound. No trail. Not even a crushed leaf. Just absence—like it was never there at all. But I know what I saw. The shape of those eyes. The size of that shadow. And the hum in my bones tells me whatever it was… the ley lines noticed. And they didn’t let go.
Nothing remains but shadows and night.
