The GPS had lost its signal long ago, yet the little icon on your map still blinks cheerily along, curling and twisting through paths that seemed far longer than the span of the old growth outside of town. Somewhere far above you, two moons hang in the sky, crescents glittering like blades in the dark, and the stillness of the night is broken only by what sounds like distant thunder.

Your phone is slick in your grasp, although whether from the summer heat or nerves is impossible to tell, the little "20 seconds until arrival" staring hopefully out at you in the darkness, the headlights of your car long since lost to the branches and curling roots of the path behind you. Any minute now, there's going to be the shape of a house coming into view, as you awkwardly balance the slowly-cooling box, clambering over a log and swinging awkwardly down into the dirt. A house, maybe some old RV, for sure. There's even a red-orange light flickering from up ahead.

Campers. Of course. Bit weird that they'd want cheap and greasy this late at night, but hey, as long as they tip well...

The sigh of relief has barely passed your lips as you round the next tree, the forest opening up under a domed canopy of tangled branches. It's a clearing, and there's definitely fire, but this is far from any family camping trip you've ever heard of.

The trees themselves seem to whisper and howl, lending their windy voices to a deep, throbbing beat that comes from everywhere and nowhere, the flames of the bonfire in the middle of it dancing sinuously to the song. The leaves feel like hands, around you, urging you forward, and the glint of eyes and horns sparkles from inside the trees. You're closer to the fire, now, despite not remembering taking a step at all, and the soft earth underfoot sparks a shiver when you see shoes burning in the flames, the familiar pink and red of the pair you got for half-off already blackening and blowing away in flakes of ash.

Before the fire is a congregation, hooved feet and furred flanks mixing with bare flesh, sap and wine flowing down curves and meeting the ragged, mossy edges of curling horns and proud antlers. How many there are and what they're doing is impossible to tell, a sinuous, ever-changing kaleidoscope of wet, slick skin plunging and stretching, clutching and being pulled, legs thrown over shoulders and eyes beckoning from beneath hair woven with sticks and leaves, blue and ochre spiraling on painted skin until one body's heavy curves melt into the urgent pulse of muscle that seems to ripple with animal heat.

Every body, every root underfoot, even the branches themselves, arc and point, like a field of spinning compasses, to the center, where the leaves overhead are so thick they block out even the moons above. From the center of it all rises a tree, gnarled with age and so thick with vines that it seems to move, opening up before you to reveal the hollow of its bark. It's a throne, impossible to mistake, and a tree, the images seeming to melt across your mind as if they both exist at once, the hands of its occupant laid casually on the twisted bark.

His eyes seem to reach through you and pull you forward, the flicker of the flames showing both an ageless smile and the ancient gold of bone, black eyes that stand apart from time and twisted, curling antlers rising up to cast their own shadows like a cage of dark around you.

He knows you. The set of his shoulders, laid back against the bark and root of the throne, the tangled black of hair and the motionless set of sinew, rising up before you until the antlers and the eyes seem to blot out the dark itself. The spiraling paint, the shift of hooves that could span all the forests of the world in a bound, all of it swirls up and tugs at you, the scent of sweat and holly, the forest and the sky above, tangles your thoughts until you're before him, drums and fire behind you. He's smiling, watching you, the glittering eyes so far beneath his own as supple hands and swirling tongues play about what rises below echoing his gaze. Even that has a shadow larger than your own, vein and sinew and heavy heat pushing aside your thoughts.

"- right?"

The voice slides through your reverie, and black eyes blink expectantly at you from above.

"That's going to be, er, sixteen-fifty, right? For a large?"