A cuckoo call echoed over the foliage, swirling around thick mossy tree-trunks, and startling Val. It was the first and only sound he had heard in a good half an hour. The deeper he had gotten into the woods, the more eerily quiet everything had become. The sounds of his own feet shifting gravel and snapping branches had formed such a hypnotically insulating bubble around him that he’d felt quite alone in the woods – until the cuckoo started calling and awoke Val to the awareness of all the things that could be hiding around here. In the setting sun, the ancient trees were throwing sharp, long shadows everywhere. The forest was like a chessboard, covered in blotches of yellow bright light and void-like black.

“All right then,” Val half-whispered to himself, if only to feel less unsettled about the unnatural quiet all around. “If I read the map correctly, it should be just about around here. A little south-east from the path crossing. Let’s see if I’m correct or just entirely walked into the wrong direction.”

Rummaging in his backpack, Val pulled out his phone, which still had the satellite map app open. The blue dot determining his location hadn’t moved since the last time he checked. The lone backpacker waited a while for information to load but the dot didn’t budge. Bad connection maybe? Val tapped the refresh button but instead of reloading the app started complaining about “connection error”. Refreshing again didn’t help, and a quick test of a browser resulted in nothing but more connectivity notices.

“Huh, that’s not great. This shouldn’t be a dead zone or anything.”

He really should have loaded the area’s off-line map into his phone before he left – but these woods had seemed so close by and familiar it didn’t feel necessary. He had hiked here before. … Well, not here exactly, but in other parts of this enormous forest where the trails were better maintained and more accessible. And the area was small, a valley wedged in between too hill ridges and a river. Besides, maybe the off-line map wouldn’t have helped either. The phone seemed to have trouble even getting a signal and telling where he was.

“Wonder if that’s a really good sign or a very very bad sign”, he mumbled and looked around with mild concern. He could always start walking back. As long as he walked north, west or somewhere in between, he would eventually come back to one of the two paths. It would be difficult to see in no time at all, and although he had specifically wanted to examine everything in the moonlight, he wouldn’t ever get a chance to do that if he didn’t find it first or if he got lost. It would be a shame to leave without finding anything but...

As Val was looking around, considering, the phone he was still holding in his hand flashed. Or… Something happened to the screen either way. It seemed to glitch out entirely for a second. Frowning, Val lifted the device up and tried to angle it similarly to how it had just been. It flashed again. The entire screen just started flickering with black horizontal lines that flashed in an out of sight when the camera was directed at a certain point. “Oh? Trying to show me what I’m looking for? … Must be some kind of magnetic field. Probably a side effect of the metals they used.”

Val hated the idea of ruining his phone for this. Undoubtedly bringing it closed to whatever was making it misbehave would not be great. … But it was an old phone anyways, and he had been meaning to get a new one. So, instead Val directed the phone in the right direction and started walking towards it.

Branches snapped and rustled as he pushed himself through a particularly thick bush to get onward. He didn’t dare to walk around it, fearing that he’d lose the glitchy “signal”. Maybe he needn’t have bothered, however. The phone was getting worse quickly. Lines of black became bigger than lines of normalcy. Then you could barely even see the screen display at all. And then, blank. The phone turned off and the screen turned all black.

Val was about to groan in frustration – but then he looked up to see where he had ended up. It was a small clearing in the middle of the woods. A square stone platform rose in the middle, with two steps winding around it on all sides. Four tall obelisks stood on the ground by the platform. All things considered, the monument seemed surprisingly well-preserved. Only small chunks of the stairs had crumpled away during the decades. Just one of the obelisks had snapped from the middle and fallen to the ground. To Val’s surprise, none of the stone had any moss or grass growing on it. In fact, there were barely even any leaves on top of anything.

“Jackpot!” Val yell-whispered. This was the most intact ceremonial structure of this kind he had ever seen - even outside of well documented internet photos and that one site in Virginia. This was going to be huge! Maybe this would give his channel the boost he had been looking for. It had so been worth it to spend hours in the local library looking through old witch trial papers, arrest records, and old maps. It had been a long shot, since his town had never been particularly famous for the occult - but for an untravelled, poor high-schooler looking into his own neighborhood was the best he could do. Sure, it had been such a longshot to speculate about an unfound Coven Shrine in the middle of the woods based on one measly diary entry.

But hadn’t he been right? Clearly this site was so well preserved precisely because it had remained a secret for so long. It was such an honor to get to find it. If only he could get some footage of it. A digital camera would likely suffer the same faith as his phone, but maybe…

Val pulled out a disposable polaroid camera. The quality wasn’t great but he wouldn’t feel too awful about breaking it. He took a few steps back and snapped a single picture of the whole site. The camera whined loudly, screaming and complaining as something went wrong. But in the end, it did print out the picture. “... Hope it can withstand a couple photos at least.”

Sadly, he only had one disposable camera with him - but, then, he could always come back another day perhaps. Val waltzed closer to the site to see if there were any particularly important details to snap a photo of.

That was when the unease started to creep up his back. The stones were just… too clean. Sure, that gave him an uncommonly good look at the ceremonial and decorative carvings scraped into the metallic dark stone. But it also felt decidedly unnatural. No grime in the crevices, no dust on the cracks. Three leaves tops on the platform.

Val whipped around to see any other signs of people being here recently. Shoe prints, passage trails, cigarette butts. He saw non but now he felt like he was being watched. It was probably just in his head, right? Val snapped a few more pictures of the carvings on the platform and the pillars. At picture five the camera let out a mechanical screech and started smelling like burning. That probably indicated it didn’t work anymore. It was just as well. There was so little light it would soon be impossible to make out anything in the pictures anyways.

“You need to leave.”

The voice, low-pitched and feminine came from behind him, calm but stern. Val spun around to face the woman. It was impossible to say what she looked like. Val’s eyes seemed to have trouble focusing on her, like she was really far away even though she was just standing on the other side of the platform.

“I-I’m sorry. But this is not a private area and-”

“You’re not welcome here.”

“Ma’am, please. There’s no need to-”

“Not. Welcome.”

Val tapped the lens of the polaroid camera, unsure what to do. His heart was beating like crazy, and he wanted to run - though a rational part of his brain said that there were no modern witches. And certainly there wasn’t any actual witchcraft that could harm him. But if that was so, why was she here, and… did she have blood on her face?! Instinctually Val knew that running would be a bad idea - but he took a few steps back unintentionally.

“But-”

“You truly are an audacious one!” the woman huffed in a tone that was starting to sound annoyed. “You will turn back around and return back to the path. Realize your imposing on a holy place, and leave!”

Vall stumbled back and tripped over the broken section of one of the obelisks. A frustrated crowl sounded around the clearing, and Val just knew the woman had ran out of patience. She’d been polite so far but wasn’t going to continue. He needed to get the fuck out of here before she could catch him!

Val stumbled on his feet and was just about to scram, when... Suddenly she was just there, standing right beside and had a hold of his arm. Cold claws pressed on his bicep like glass. Val could smell iron and rot wafting off the woman, could almost swear her black clothing was wiggling around on her skin as though it were made out of worms. One dropped on his shoulder as she leaned over him.

There was a small metallic ping at the back of Val’s spine, and the world fell away into darkness.

When Val came through, his head was throbbing. White morning light tore into his eyes and pulled him back to reality. He was lying in the middle of the road next to his mother’s car. Sharp gravel dug into his cheek, and side, and back, and his mouth tasted like ash. He was all alone.

As soon as Val remembered why he was there, he hurried to dig through his pockets and backpack - but the photos were all gone and so was the polaroid camera. Before he could even entertain the thought that the evening might’ve been his imagination however, he did find his phone - completely broken beyond repair and the memory card fully corrupted. None of the data could be retrieved from it.

In the following days, and weeks, and months, Val returned to the valley often to try and find the Coven Shrine for more pictures. But no matter how systematically he hiked through the woods, or how many digital devices he brought to help him, he never did find his way back to the clearing again…

Think I sorta lost inspiration half-way through but at least I (barely) made it in time

Here is the prompt this follows: (Character: Witch Setting: At Sunset, Dark Woods Conflict: A Mystery Needs to be Solved)

(This is sort of based on a younger, less experienced version of this paranormal investigator character I’ve been meaning to write a longer story about. Perhaps in an interactive manner on BL – but Idk if I have the guts for that :D)