In the heart of the brush, where the thickets thinned to reveal sky-broken fragments, lay a grove seldom spoken of—its existence drifting in the cloudy consciousness of those who carried the town's whispered vestiges.

A boy once mapped it in ink against posy, claiming the sun-kissed stones, moss-coated altars, and the cyclopean oaks held dormant relics of his forebears. Beneath its canopies, tales looped and curled, freighted with bounds known to few.

Years bucked and rolled since, growing shadows morphed along parallel pathways—a secret dignity sprawled between the root-wreathed arches of whispered light.

Beware the rust when touch happens, for cold-fingered ambitions have drawn figures whose chronicling seemed imperially honest at first but later, with woods bristling furiously, hurried papers fell behind blind eyes, yielding only colorless blurs.