11:22
In the old forests, where the ground was stitched with roots and bones and the names of the dead sank faster than iron, time was never trusted. Clocks belonged to houses, not to forests. Still, there was one minute the forest kept for itself, a narrow breath between belonging and becoming, when even the boldest paths lost their confidence and the full moon dipped low, as if listening for a promise long forgotten. The elders called it 11:22, not because they had named it first, but because that was when the world paused to see what it had been ignoring.
🦉
On nights when the moon pressed against the treetops like an unblinking eye, the forest prepared itself. Branches bent inward. Moss glimmered faintly, remembering fire. The air thickened with resin, damp fur, and something older, metallic and sweet. Animals fell into place without command: the wolf crouched at the edge, deer froze farther back and the owl counted the dark with deliberate turns. Silence arrived not as absence, but as discipline.
🦉
That was when Linda emerged.
🦉
She did not move; she simply existed, as inevitable and quiet as frost creeping over the forest floor in early autumn. Her body seemed woven from the forest itself - bark, shadow, and the faint, dull glimmer of offerings pressed into her skin, as if the forest had remembered her long before she appeared. Where a face should have been rested a pale, cracked skull, its hollow center holding a single eye, luminous and deep, reflecting both the moonlight and the darkness between the trees. That eye did not blink, yet it saw everything: the hidden tremors of thought, the weight of fear and longing pressed into the earth.
🦉
The people said she was once human, though no one agreed how. Some whispered she had walked too far into the forest carrying grief heavier than her body; others claimed she had been chosen before birth, marked by the forest itself as a keeper of thresholds. The old songs hinted at a pact - blood on roots, breath on bone - but the verses were fragmentary, swallowed by time. What endured was the knowing: Linda belonged to the forest, and the forest belonged to no one.
🦉
At 11:22, the ritual began.
🦉
The trees leaned inward, bark splitting softly, sap seeping like old wounds. Between them formed a clearing that had no business existing, its soil dark and pulsing as if breathing. Those who arrived felt the ground hum beneath their feet, a vibration settling into their spine. Linda stood at the northern edge, horns catching moonlight, eye reflecting both the moon and some secret depth beyond it. She did not move first.
🦉
Those who had been called removed what separated them from the earth: shoes, rings, sometimes blood. Offerings were placed at the roots - hardened bread, threads torn from garments of sorrow, bones carried unknowingly for years. The forest drank the offerings into itself, and for a moment, the clearing hummed with their quiet surrender. Linda did not move among them, yet the weight of her gaze pressed deeper than any offering could, unraveling deceit, fear and hope alike, leaving nothing hidden from the forest’s witness.
🦉
Then the portal opened.
🦉
It was not a door, but a thinning - air loosening, light bending, sound folding over itself. Those who stepped forward felt their bodies remember what their minds had buried: instincts disciplined into obedience, desires starved into silence, grief fossilized with time. Linda’s skull faced them, eye unwavering. In its glow there was no past, no future - only the present, unbearable and clear, and the quiet question: will you see yourself?
Some broke. They fell to their knees, pressed foreheads to soil, wept into roots older than language. The forest did not punish them. Linda did not turn. Not every truth ripens at the same pace.
🦉
Others crossed. Something peeled away - not pain, but pretense. The portal offered no salvation, only reclamation. On the other side lay the self, stripped of excuses and ornament, standing face to face with what it had always known and never dared to live. Some returned altered: quieter, steadier, unwilling to betray themselves again. Others did not return at all, their absence settling into the forest like seed.
🦉
At 11:23, the ritual ended.
🦉
The circle collapsed. Trees straightened. Offerings sank into the soil. Linda dissolved back into the forest, bone into bark, horn into branch, skull into the long memory of the land, and her eye faded last, a final acknowledgment of what had been seen. Time resumed its careful, relentless march.
🦉
By morning, the forest revealed nothing.
🦉
Yet the old people said this: the forest does not take from you what you are willing to carry. It only takes what you pretend is yours. Linda is not a demon, nor a goddess, nor a warning. She is the shape the forest gives to truth when truth has waited long enough.
🦉
And at 11:22, when the moon leans too close and the ground begins to listen, the forest still asks the same question it has always asked:
Will you cross as you are - or will you remain wearing the face that keeps you small?