Overcoming his immediate instinct to turn back, David switched his headlamp to its lowest setting and stepped closer. The silver highway of spiders led directly into a wide, jagged split at the base of the tree. He leaned his head inside the trunk, aiming his camera lens into the eerie, glowing cavern.
The interior trunk was massive, completely hollowed out by time. The inner walls were an undulating, breathing curtain of millions of spiders spinning endless webs. But they weren’t covering empty space. An intense, otherworldly green luminescence was bleeding heavily over a massive, unidentifiable shape wedged tightly inside the core.
It was a jagged, geometric mass completely cloaked in decades of calcified mud, wood pulp, and thick webbing. David strained his eyes, but in the pulsing light, it looked utterly alien—a massive metallic growth that the tree’s ancient, grasping roots had swallowed whole and lifted ten feet into the air. He couldn’t make sense of it, but the sheer scale of the hidden object made his skin crawl.