Lorraine of the Timberlands

A laconic wanderer, gaunt as cedar bark, drifts back into the mist-choked timberlands clutching nothing but a rusted compass and the hollow echo of a lullaby he once hummed to an infant whose face has blurred into myth. Fifteen winters prior, a charcoal-hearted revenant known only as Black Bart bled thunder across these same woods: he stormed a lantern-lit cabin, slaughtered lullabies, drove the child’s mother to a granite precipice where she embraced gravity rather than his leer, and vanished into the pines with the crying bundle. Now the wanderer—once husband, once father—discovers that the stolen girl has grown into a wild-eyed, axe-swinging river nymph who carves her initials into driftwood and loves a quiet deputy whose badge trembles whenever she laughs. Bart, still cloaked in gun-smoke, slits the sheriff’s throat and pins the crime on the boy. Blood calls to blood; the father swallows guilt like a boulder, shackles himself in lieu of the lover, and is marched to a limewashed prison whose corridors smell of wet iron. Bart next schemes to reave the daughter, but the sky fractures: lightning fingers rake the jail, walls burst like rotten fruit, and the liberated patriarch sprints through a biblical tempest toward a final reckoning among uprooted pines and ancestral screams.