Vein Woods: Part 2

This is the link for part 1 for anyone who has not read it yet:

---

Part 2:

The corrupt kept screaming, even silently long after their lungs had been taken out.

The newest arrivals had come in a single wave this spring. Soldiers from villages they had burned down, corrupt CEOs who buried whistleblowers in concrete and traffickers who named their victims after how well they had taken their abuse. This harvest was the largest Hel had ever seen.

She had not called to them though. The roots that had spread out under major cities had planted seeds into the edges of their mind. They came on their own, driven by instinct or guilt as the rot gnaws away at their soul.

They crawled slowly across miles of thorny vines, their hands shredded and knees broken. Some begged for a reprieve, others laughed manically. A few began tearing the flesh from their faces before even reaching the Cathedral, offering it like a tribute.

Hel waited and her altar glistened.

Made from vertebrae and bound together with the fat of the gluttonous, it sat at the center of her throne room directly under Elena. In her sac, she recorded each scream and memory into organic scripture, pumping sins down into the floor like blood through a heart.

She took them one by one. Her knives were obsidian, jagged with intent. She removed their hands and replaced them with vines that would drag them around uncontrollably. She split their chests to expose hearts that still believed in redemption, then crushed them in her palm like soft fruit. The nerves screamed the longest.

Some were embedded in the walls, their faces stretched into distorted masks of eternal pain. Others were sewn into the roots, their mouths forced to shout their misgivings into the ground over and over again.

One man, an oil baron whose corner cutting had resulted in burning an entire river alive, had been planted in the ceiling. His eyes wired open with branches and forced to watch his blood feed the Cathedral for the rest of his unnatural life.

And still, more came.

The Woods were overflowing. The Cathedral swelled, its muscle walls trembling from all the pressure as the bones in the floor cracked.

Hel had no more room.

She stood beneath the beating heart of The Cathedral, the arteries in its chest pumping with the overflow of absorbed sin, and for the first time in a thousand years, she felt tired.

That night, she slept, and dreamed of a child she had held once, long ago.

Now a woman, standing barefoot in a sunlit field. Her hands were clean and her eyes were kind. In her hair, the leaves of the Vein Woods had grown, not black and wet with pus, but blossoms vibrant and red like freshly picked roses.

Her name was Dharrsheena.

Hel woke with a start.

She whispered the name again.

“Dharrsheena…”

Dharrsheena lived in sun. Her life was clean, sterile even. Filled with books without blood and memories without suffering. She’d become a botanist, of all things. Specializing in fungal resilience where she spent years teaching plants how to adapt to polluted soil. How to survive long after nature had given up.

She nurtured with the same intensity Hel punished and there was a softness to her. She had always been different and knew this from an early age. She didn't seem to connect with people like she did with nature and at night, she traced spirals onto her skin with her fingertips. She didn’t know why.

Until the dream came.

A Cathedral made of bone.

A forest that screamed in voices she recognised.

And a woman, veiled in eyelids, whispering from the root of all things:

"You left me so you could learn how to forgive. Now come home."

The next morning, her garden was dead. Not wilted, but emptied, like the plants had packed up and just left. In their place was a single seed, black with red veins and twitching to the same beat of her heart.

She doesn't know why, but she swallowed it. And she walked.

Dharrsheena had spent her life healing the world, and now, something was calling her back to where pain was born.

She didn’t pack. A part of her inside knew she didn’t need to. This was a one way trip.

By the time she stepped into the forest’s edge, the trees had already made a space for her and the Cathedral groaned in anticipation.

Its skin, bloated with centuries of agony, pulsed as Dharrsheena approached. It remembered her, not her face, but her absence. The missing rhythm. The light that had once kept the darkness in check.

Hel met her at the gates, spider-limbs digging into soil slick with blood. The veil of eyelids fluttering with every breath.

“You sent me away,” Dharrsheena said, standing tall despite the stench and the screams that assailed her senses.

“So you could grow in soil untouched by blood,” Hel replied. “You were the part of me I carved out, the part that still believed in mercy.”

The Woods listened with a new found curiosity. It had never known mercy.

That night, the two sat in silence inside the Cathedral’s heart chamber. The floor, once slick with fluid, dried beneath Dharrsheena’s bare feet. The screaming walls fell silent. And slowly, Hel began to unravel.

Her sinew legs retracted and the veil dissolved into ash in the air. Her exposed ribcage folded shut like a plant closing up for winter, sealing the pulsing heart within.

Hel crawled to the base of the oldest tree, the first tree that had started to bleed, and curled into its roots.

She did not speak again.

Dharrsheena stood in the Cathedral, its blood thirsty body now stilled. The altars of pain had collapsed and the walls peeled like healing scabs.

She climbed to the apex, where Dr. Elena Morozova still floated in a sac of transparent nerve-flesh, her brain wired into the dreaming cortex of the Wood.

Elena smiled.

“You’re her,” she said.

“No,” Dharrsheena answered. “I am what she wanted to become.”

And in the center, from where rot once ruled, she whispered a single word:

“Grow.”

Under her guidance, the Cathedral changed.

The bones were repurposed. The memories carved into skin were released into the wind, carried across the world as whispers of repentance. The Shells were freed, those mutilated sentries of old, given names, voices, and bodies reborn from bark and branch. No longer monsters, they stood as proud guardians.

The bloodrain still fell. But now it cleansed.

The screams no longer cursed. They sang lullabies from those who had once suffered, guiding the living away from cruelty.

As so the Vein Woods continued to spread, but not in conquest, in healing.

The trees still pulsed, but now with life instead of infection. Their bark no longer peeled like scabs, but shed gently like autumn leaves. Where the Vein Woods once spread like a plague of guilt, it now reached as an immune system of the Earth itself, digesting trauma, absorbing rot, and feeding something new.

It became a network of consuming sorrow.

And it began to teach.

In Kenya, a murdered girl’s bones bloomed into a forest that revealed the truth of her killer’s thoughts to the world.

In Sweden, a man who had abused his family awoke with trees growing from his back. Their leaves screamed the names of his victims until he turned himself in.

In Singapore, an office building collapsed, revealing a root system that absorbed corporate blood money and released spores of truth through the air.

In Syria, a warlord disappeared into the sand. In his place, grew a flowering orchard of nerves, each petal containing names he’d tried to erase. They could be heard sobbing when the wind passed through.

In America, a homeless encampment vanished. Authorities feared mass overdose but weeks later, a patch of flora emerged where it once stood and anyone who walked through it reported memories that were not their own. Memories of warmth, kindness and meals shared under bridges.

All across the world, the Cathedral bloomed.

No longer a house of horror.

But a place of healing.

And at the heart of it was Dharrsheena. Sat on a throne not of bones, but of branches interlaced with bright red flowers. Her voice was like velvet to the ears of those deserving, her hands stained in the sap of good deeds. When she sang, the trees swayed, not in pain, but in reverence.

As for Hel?

She sleeps beneath the soil, in the oldest part of the forest, her heart finally at rest.

But some nights, when the wind is just right, and the moon glows like with a bright aura, Dharrsheena kneels beneath the still bloodweeping tree and listens.

And from the earth, a whisper always returns:

“I’m proud of you.”

--- The End..... Maybe

@copyright: Daniel Millington 2025

*I would like to say a special thanks to Dharrsheena who has been an incredible support for me on Vocal for the past 2 years. Please take some time to view her profile below as she writes the most incredible stories.