The baobab's massive silhouette clawed against the twilight sky. Biram, barely 14, pressed closer to his father. The dry Senegalese air, usually carrying the scent of dust and roasted peanuts, felt heavy, wrong. Tonight, an earthy musk, sharp and unsettling, filled his nostrils.
"Stay close, Biram," his father, Ibrahima, warned, his baritone lower than usual. He gripped his machete tighter. "We shouldn't be out this late."
They were collecting firewood, a chore postponed until too late in the day. Ibrahima, a carpenter known for his steady hands, moved with uncommon anxiety. Biram sensed something besides the approaching darkness frightened him.
The village elder had spoken stories around the cooking fire – tales dismissed as foolishness meant for children. Creatures born from twisted wood and shadow. The Tree People. He never gave them credence.
But Ibrahima, a man of logic and quiet strength, now scanned the upper boughs of the acacias with wide, nervous eyes. Biram swallowed, a knot forming in his stomach. The wind rustled the leaves, a sound that usually soothed him. Now, it seemed like whispers.
Deeper into the thicket they went, the ground crunching beneath their sandals. The baobabs became dense, ancient things, their gnarled branches resembling skeletal arms reaching for the sky. An unnatural quiet had befallen the wood. The insects, usually a deafening orchestra, were silent.
"Papa," Biram whispered, his throat suddenly dry. "I don't like this."
"Almost done, son. Just need a few more branches." Ibrahima forced a tone of assurance, but his unease was infectious.
He bent to pick up a fallen branch, its surface smooth and strangely cool to the touch. A dark resinous sap stained the wood. He straightened, and that's when Biram noticed it.
Movement. High above, where the canopy shielded the last vestiges of light, a disturbance. Not the usual rustling of wind, but something deliberate, measured. Like something shifting.
"Papa, look!" He pointed, his finger shaking.
Ibrahima followed his son's line of sight. His expression went ashen. The color drained from his face, replaced by stark fear. He grabbed Biram's arm, pulling him close.
"Run, Biram! Run, now!" He shoved the boy toward the path they'd just come from.
Biram hesitated, fear warring with the instinctive urge to obey his father. What was so terrifying that it made Ibrahima abandon their wood, abandon his sense of reason?
Then he heard it. A cracking sound, not of breaking wood, but of splintering bone. And a low growl, inhuman and chilling. It resonated in his very core. He looked back.
Ibrahima stood frozen, looking upward. From the baobab's trunk, figures detached. Not figures, Biram understood with sickening horror, but extensions of the tree itself. Grotesque beings molded from wood, vine, and shadow. Their eyes, gleaming chips of obsidian, fixated on Ibrahima.
They dropped with impossible silence, landing with heavy thuds. Their limbs were elongated, contorted, tipped with sharp, thorn-like points. They surrounded Ibrahima.
Biram screamed. He wanted to go back, wanted to save his father, but his legs felt like lead. Fear had turned him to stone.
The Tree People attacked with silent, unnerving speed. They didn't shout or roar, only a wet, ripping sound cut through the stillness. The sight that played out made Biram want to regurgitate his insides, but his terror anchored him to the spot, his senses unwillingly absorbing the horrifying truth of it. His father screamed once. Just once.
Then silence.
Biram turned and ran, the image of Ibrahima being torn apart burned into his eyelids. He sprinted blindly, tripping over roots and rocks, thorns tearing at his skin. He didn't know where he was going, only that he had to get away.
He burst from the trees, collapsing onto the sandy path leading back to his village. His breath came in ragged gasps, his heart pounding like a drum against his ribs. He scrambled to his feet and ran toward home.
The village seemed oblivious, the cooking fires glowed invitingly, and he could hear drums. People talking and laughing. How could they be so normal when his world had fractured just moments before?
He reached his house, a small mud brick structure with a thatched roof. His mother, Awa, sat outside, grinding millet.
"Biram! What took you so long? Where's your father?" Her brow furrowed with worry.
He couldn't speak. He could only sob, pointing back toward the wood.
Awa rose, her eyes widening with apprehension. "What is it, son? What happened?"
He tried to form the words, but they caught in his throat. Tree People. How could he say it? It sounded insane, childish. But he had seen them. He knew.
Awa grabbed his shoulders, shaking him gently. "Biram, talk to me! Where is your father?"
"The…the Tree People," he choked out, tears streaming down his face. "They…they took him."
Awa stared at him, her expression unreadable. Then she laughed, a short, brittle sound. "Tree People? Biram, you're frightening me. Those are just stories."
"No! They're real! I saw them! They killed Papa!" His voice cracked.
Awa pulled him into her arms, stroking his hair. "It was a hyena, Biram. A hyena probably got him. We'll get the men and search."
He tried to protest, but the disbelief in her voice was a wall. He knew no one would believe him. The Tree People were tales, fabrication told to children, boogeyman. Not real.
But they were real. He knew that with stark certainty. And he knew they'd taken his father.
The village men, armed with machetes and torches, followed him back into the trees. He tried to lead them to the spot, but the woods seemed different now, twisted and unfamiliar.
They found nothing. No sign of a struggle, no blood, nothing to show Ibrahima had even been there.
The men exchanged dubious looks. Some whispered, questioning Biram's sanity. Awa stood beside him, her face etched with a mixture of grief and doubt.
"He's just a boy, traumatized by the darkness," one of the men said.
Biram wanted to scream. He wanted to shake them, make them believe him. But the words died in his throat. He was alone.
Days turned into weeks. The village mourned Ibrahima's absence. Awa withdrew into herself, her eyes filled with a hollow sadness. She never spoke of the Tree People again. And she looked at Biram differently, as if he were damaged, unreliable.
He returned to the wood, every day searching, every day the undergrowth mocked him. Each shadow looked like one of them. Sometimes at night he'd have to scramble under his cot just from the night sounds.
He started to sleep less. As the night pressed down with soundless intent he began to question if the stars themselves might reach down to the Earth one day. How they may grasp and steal life from him the way the shadows grasped his papa.
Then they started turning up, bodies in nearby villages. They dismissed it as the work of other tribes until they recognized their craftsmanship. Then it was dismissed again for something simple. Like animals. Because animals use tools now.
He became his mother's burden as he struggled to keep the horror locked within him. She kept the locks latched tight by simply saying his Papa died like a man out in the woods. And nothing else would be said on the topic.
Years rolled over him like flood waters until he became a man. As all did they took a wife in order to bring more life into the world. They said to always remember your fathers but Biram did something else entirely. He planned.
He worked wood for some measure of comfort in the light but every night in his darkness all he saw was how he was going to burn the woods away and kill all the Tree People. Because something so great could not just die like his papa died, simply gone.
Justice had to be born into the world like a newborn calf, or what meaning was there in a thing? So that's exactly what he'd bring to them. No warning. Justice.
One evening the air again had that deep earthy musk of rot and old life. Not from the trees, something had turned to see him. At the center of the wood sat his mother.
Old and on the ground not 100 feet away from him with Tree People dragging her down like ants eating into an overripe mango. One looked up to him from its gruesome repast and grinned with dark and sharp slivers of wood it called teeth.
Another mockingly put her bone mask in place over what once was and grinned at him like the devil in disguise. But Awa moved, trying to claw at the branch next to her but her strength waned from being cut nearly in two.
She opened her mouth, blood spraying with each painful effort and told him he should just listen and go. To simply die out in peace like a man like his father. Then all went silent as she lost all ability. So had she really seen them that day he cried? Maybe she had never seen Papa get drug down. Just found some bones.
Now those bones she will take for her too. Just so I'll leave forever in a great peace. This wasn't fair, he should have died on the journey instead. Why would you lead your child to be butchered alive for something as empty as this?!
His face burned as the torches he'd spent a year constructing fell limp out of his limp hands into the dirt and the light left his eyes with hot, heavy tears streaming.
He became paralyzed for what felt like years as they picked her clean. But something then stood above the Tree Folk from behind. Not in threat, like someone stood over a group of children just so that he may finally be noticed.
Ibrahima smiled down on Biram, eyes gleaming black as obsidian, smiling as a man would at seeing his wife, who beckoned him with skeletal fingers. "It is time, son."
And as Biram joined them in taking what they wanted from his soul to stitch into his skin. From bone dust in the winds, to the next branch breaking beneath the foot of an unsuspecting child. No memory left, or right.
And all had become Tree.