Vein Woods

**WARNING: I wanted to write a very grotesque horror that could potentially be turned into a series depending on the reception. It is not pretty. You have been warned.**

In the forgotten northern reaches of Belarus, buried beneath centuries of superstition and the standard government denial, lies a forest known to the locals as Vein Woods.

No-one will claim it so therefore, it doesn’t appear on any map. The trees don’t grow; they pulsate. Bark splits like dry skin, and from within seeps blood all dark and warm to the touch. For seven nights each spring, the bloodrain falls, each drop a blackish red and like acid to the touch. Animals have long since vanished and machinery fails. Those who hear the Wood’s whisper in their dreams begin to walk, some from across entire continents, toward its open, bleeding entrance.

Do not weep for the victims, they are not innocent.

The Wood calls to the broken. The cruel. The violent. War criminals with fake passports, men who whisper apologies only after a bullet is in the skull. Torture artists, violent ex-lovers and failed extremists. They believe they are heading toward redemption, or power, or perhaps just an ending they finally deserve.

They find her instead.

Her name is Hel, though her original name has long since vanished beneath layers of rot and decay. She emerged from the Wood a century ago, or a thousand, time is flexible here and she has not aged since. She is not human anymore, or maybe she never was.

Hel does not walk. She is carried by a web of sinew and reanimated nerve tissue that have twisted around her feet and act like spider’s legs. Her face is wrapped in a veil made of preserved eyelids, stitched edge-to-edge which creates a fluttering effect at the edges of her face. Her ribcage is open, displaying a heart that does not beat, but pulsates with the trees around her.

She lives in Hel’s Cathedral. A massive, towering structure formed using a grotesque artistry that no hand or machine could craft. Every beam is a femur lashed to vertebrae. The floors squish with fat and muscle. The walls are made of skin stretched taut, tattooed with living veins that pump blood from unknown sources. Every surface twitches and every door groans in pain when opened.

The Cathedral is alive. And it is always hungry.

When the Wood calls, Hel prepares. On the first night of the bloodrain, she draws a circle with a scalpel dipped in faecal waste and whispers the names of the next harvest. These are not names parents gave, or ones found in registries. These are their true names, scratched deep into the soul of those who’ve committed acts the world refuses to punish.

They arrive slowly, barefoot and dazed. Some cry whilst others laugh hysterically. Some strip naked, believing they are ascending to godhood. They walk beneath trees that drip pus and blood, and by the time they reach the Cathedral, they no longer remember who they are.

They kneel.

Hel does not speak. She unfolds a table made from bones and beckons them forward, one by one.

Her tools are ancient obsidian blades, iron tongs heated in stomach acid and syringes of ink made from spinal fluid. The ritual is always the same. They do not die; they are not allowed.

Plunging a finger deep into their ears. She draws out every memory, every face, every scream caused by their deeds. These are injected into the walls of the Cathedral, visible in the twitching skin like living murals. She removes their eyes and sets them into sockets in the wall so that they can bear witness as she flays the skin leaving the nerves bare to feel the harsh sting of nature.

When she is done, the person is either fused into the roots of the building or released into the Woods as a new form. A guardian of despair, known to the locals as the shells who roam the forest without organs, their mouths sewn open into permanent screams.

With each sacrifice, she grows stronger.

In 2025, news broke of a geological survey team drilling at the border of Brest and discovering root structures that bled upon touch. The footage was “lost in a fire.” However, a single clip leaked, eighteen seconds of a man sobbing while something beneath his skin moved in circles.

Dr. Elena Morozova, an undocumented anthropologist, decided this could be her big breakthrough and followed the trail. Despite her scepticism, she became obsessive. She traced the accounts to the edge of Belarus, bribed hunters, walked for days, and on the seventh night of spring, she arrived at Vein Woods.

What she saw in the Wood violated her senses. Trees with mouths. Wind that sang lullabies in voices she knew such as her mother, her dead sister, the old man she euthanized in a mercy killing during the war. She tried taking pictures but her camera melted.

When she reached the Cathedral, Hel was waiting.

Elena, isolated and desperate, confronts Hel but instead of feeling fear, she experiences a profound understanding. In a moment of clarity, she offers herself, seeking to document the experience from within.

Hel accepted.

Elena was not torn apart, her soul was not tainted like Hel required, but she was bound to building. She became the Cathedral’s librarian. Her body floats inside a sac of transparent flesh at the apex of the central spire, her brain wired into the central nervous system of the building. Through her, the Wood can dream, it can learn. It can expand.

It is no longer contained.

In Tokyo, a subway tunnel collapsed. The rescue teams found no survivors, only a mass of root systems covered in human teeth.

In Argentina, a surgeon was found dissecting his own patients and arranging their organs into floral shapes. When arrested, he said: "She’s coming. The Architect is building again."

In France, an artist held a gallery exhibition titled “Meat as Memory”. It was shut down after attendees began compulsively carving circles into their own faces. The artist vanished. Later, a tree grew in the gallery’s center. It bled.

Where Hel walks, the soil changes.

The Wood has grown roots beneath major cities. And every time an atrocity is committed, it strengthens. The more we ignore suffering, the more it thrives.

Pain is not a side effect. It is a currency.

You think you are reading a story. You are not.

This is a warning.

The Vein Woods is not metaphor. It is not myth. It is real, and it has always been here. It is dormant when we are kind, and ravenous when we are not. It is the physical manifestation of unacknowledged cruelty, of horror made architecture, of sin made sap.

And you, yes you. You feel the roots already. That ache in the bottom of your back? That reflection that stares back at you from the mirror half a second too long or that feeling that something is watching from the shadows out of the corner of your eyes.

Hel does not need to travel. You bring her with you.

The Cathedral grows in basements. In dreams. In hospitals where the lights flicker. In the cracks you create in your own soul.

You have read the story.

Now, you’ve opened the door.

Do not sleep near the trees tonight.

--- The End..... For Now