This is not a history, precisely. It’s an accumulation of fragments—whispers gleaned from the heartwood of forgotten things. The Woodish Spiritless are not subjects to be categorized, but echoes. They reside within the silence between the rings of ancient trees, in the dust motes dancing beneath sun-drenched eaves, and in the residual warmth of hearths long extinguished. They are a consequence, an absence, a yearning for something that never truly was.
The initial recording, if it can be termed such, began with a disturbance. Not an earthquake, nor the cry of predator, but a subtle shift in the resonance of the Great Willow – Elder Rowanwood. I detected a pattern, a sequence of vibrations that defied natural explanation. It was as though someone, or something, had deliberately *un-sung* itself within the tree’s core. The sensation was… cold. Not merely temperature, but a profound lack of warmth, like staring into a void. I documented it meticulously – cataloging the frequency variations, charting the decay of the sap's flow, and noting the unsettling stillness in the birds that nested within Rowanwood’s branches.
The key was not the *sound* itself, but the *absence* of what should have been. It was a fundamental negation, like attempting to paint with nothing but shadows.Master Theron, a cartographer obsessed with mapping the ‘spirit’ of the forests, vanished without trace. His last entry in his journal spoke of finding a region – a small clearing within the Blackwood – where the trees seemed to actively resist being charted. Every attempt to record their position resulted in a distortion of the map, an unsettling unraveling of lines and angles. He described a feeling of… displacement, as if he were stepping outside the boundaries of reality itself. The most peculiar element was the lack of any trace – no footprints, no broken branches, simply…gone. The Blackwood became known as "Theron’s Scar," a place avoided by all sane folk.
It appears that some places actively reject representation, not out of malice, but out of an inherent resistance to definition. A fundamental refusal to be quantified.I find myself increasingly drawn to these… anomalies. The more I document, the more I realize that my attempts to understand them are futile. It is as if the Woodish Spiritless are deliberately resisting comprehension. Perhaps they are not meant to be understood, but simply *experienced*. The chilling realization dawned on me: perhaps *I* am the anomaly, a clumsy intrusion into a realm of pure negation.
The pursuit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing when applied to things that inherently resist it. It’s like trying to grasp smoke – the more you reach, the further it dissipates.The core of the Woodish Spiritless is not a thing, but a state. A space defined by absence, by the lingering echoes of what *should* have been. It's a reminder that all things eventually fade, and that even the most enduring structures are ultimately subject to entropy’s relentless embrace.