The Last Congregation

The demolition notice arrived on a Tuesday, nailed to what remained of the gate. Sister Margot pulled it down with shaking fingers, reading through the legal terminology that amounted to a death sentence. The Wildwood Shrine, which had stood for eight hundred years, would be cleared for development within the month. The sacred grove, where generations had come to honour the old gods of growing things, would become a shopping complex.

She carried the notice through the overgrown path, past stone markers so weathered their inscriptions had become suggestions rather than words. The two youngest acolytes, Thomas and Elara barely thirteen, both of them were tending the mushroom circles that grew in perfect rings around the altar. They looked up as she approached, their faces still soft with childhood despite the ancient wisdom their training had begun to instill.

"Sister?" Thomas's voice cracked, hovering between boy and man. "What troubles you?"

Margot showed them the paper. Elara read it first, her green eyes widening. She'd come to them as an orphan, claiming the trees had called her home. Thomas, the baker's third son, had simply appeared one morning, kneeling before the altar as if he'd always belonged there.

"They cannot," Elara whispered. "This ground is sacred. The Verdant Ones"

"The Verdant Ones are forgotten," Margot said gently. "We three are all who remember their names. And according to this, we must vacate by month's end."

The shrine itself was modest a natural cave in the hillside, enlarged over centuries by devoted hands. Inside, the walls sparkled with veins of amethyst, purple crystal that caught the filtered forest light and threw it back in patterns their order had once believed were messages from the gods. The altar was living wood, a tree stump that had never stopped growing, sending up shoots that flowered in impossible seasons.

For three days, they continued their rituals. Dawn prayers as the first light touched the crystal walls. Noon offerings of water drawn from the sacred spring. Evening songs in the language that predated the kingdom itself. But on the fourth morning, they heard the surveyors approaching, their loud voices and measuring chains a blasphemy against the morning silence.

"We could fight," Thomas suggested, his hand going to the ceremonial knife at his belt. It had never drawn blood, was meant only for harvesting sacred herbs, but his knuckles were white around its handle.

"With what army?" Margot asked. "We are three. They are the future, backed by law and gold and forgetting."

Elara was kneeling before the altar, her fingers pressed into the moss that covered the sacred stump. "The trees are angry," she murmured. "The mushrooms whisper of revenge. The old growth remembers when this whole valley was sacred, before humans divided it into owned and not-owned."

It was then that Margot remembered the final ritual, the one written in the oldest books, inscribed in languages that hurt to read. The Rooting Ceremony. It had been performed only once before, when invaders had threatened to burn the first shrine. The guardians then had given themselves to the grove, becoming part of it, protecting it from within rather than without.

She should have been horrified by the thought. Should have sent the children away, faced this alone. But when she looked at them Thomas with his fierce devotion, Elara with her uncanny connection to the growing things she saw they had already understood. Perhaps they had known before she had.

"It requires three," Elara said simply. "One to be the trunk, two to be the roots."

"You're children," Margot protested, though even as she spoke, she knew it was futile. The grove had chosen them just as it had chosen her. They were here because nowhere else in the world would have them. Orphans all, in different ways.

"We're guardians," Thomas corrected. "Age means nothing to the Verdant Ones. You taught us that."

They began that night, as the moon rose full and silver above the trees. The ritual was simple in its components earth, water, wood, and willing sacrifice. They mixed their blood with the sacred soil, each cutting their palm and letting seven drops fall onto the altar. They drank from the spring, water that tasted of minerals and memory. They bound themselves with vines, connecting their bodies to the living wood.

Margot spoke the words in the old tongue, feeling them reshape reality around her. The amethyst in the cave walls began to pulse with purple light. The mushrooms released spores that glowed like stars. The moss crept up their legs, their arms, sprouting flowers that bloomed and died and bloomed again in moments.

"I give my body to be your temple," Margot intoned, feeling bark beginning to form over her skin. "I give my breath to be your wind. I give my heart to be your roots."

Thomas and Elara repeated the words, their voices harmonizing in ways human throats shouldn't allow. The vines tightened, pulling them closer to the altar, into each other, through the spaces between what was real and what was sacred.

The pain was extraordinary. Every nerve screamed as their flesh transformed, as bone became wood and blood became sap. But beneath the agony was something else an opening, vast and green and ancient. The consciousness of the forest itself, welcoming them home.

Margot felt Thomas and Elara's terror and wonder as they began to merge. She tried to hold them separate, to preserve something of who they had been, but the forest was hungry and had been alone too long. It pulled them in, through, together. She managed to create a hollow, a space within the transformation where their spirits could nestle, protected from complete dissolution.

The amethyst cracked, opening like a geode, like a wound, like a womb. She pressed the children's essence into it, sealing them within crystal walls while her own consciousness spread through bark and branch. They would be safe there, still themselves, still able to help with the work.

When the surveyors returned at dawn, they found the shrine changed. Where three guardians had knelt, a single figure stood neither tree nor human but something between. Moss-covered and flowering, with mushrooms that grew in perfect ritual circles. And in its chest, a purple crystal hollow that seemed to lead somewhere else entirely, where two small lights moved like candles in an endless evening service.

The lead surveyor approached with his equipment, but his measuring chains rusted to powder when they touched the figure. His compass spun wildly, unable to find north. The painted marks they'd left on trees had grown over with bark, as if they'd been gone for decades rather than days.

"What in God's name..." one of the men whispered.

But it wasn't God's name that mattered here. It was older names, forgotten names, names that could only be spelled now in the arrangement of mushrooms, the spiral of moss, the pattern of flowers that bloomed regardless of season.

They tried to return with equipment, with crews, with bulldozers. But the forest had awakened. Paths that had been clear became impassable. Maps became useless as landmarks shifted. Men would enter the woods and emerge hours later, days worth of beard growth on their faces, speaking of months spent wandering though their watches insisted only minutes had passed.

The shopping complex was never built. The development company went bankrupt after several workers reported "impossible experiences" and refused to return. The land was eventually designated a historical preserve, though no one could quite agree on what history was being preserved.

Fernwick for that's what the locals began calling the figure, though no one remembered why continued the sacred work. Dawn prayers whispered through rustling leaves. Noon offerings of rain and sun. Evening songs in the creaking of wood and the settling of earth.

The two spirits in the purple hollow learned to navigate their crystalline realm, discovering they could influence the growth of flowers, the spread of moss, the fruiting of mushrooms. They painted prayers in living things, maintaining the rituals in ways no human body could sustain. Sometimes visitors would see them two small lights dancing in the purple depths, like children playing in an amethyst garden.

Professor Barnabas Ravenwood encountered Fernwick during his survey of abandoned religious sites, though "abandoned" seemed the wrong word for a shrine so obviously tended. In his notes, he wrote:

"The entity designated 'Fernwick' appears to be a composite being, three souls bound in singular purpose. The physical form serves as both guardian and shrine, body and temple unified. The purple crystal cavity houses two distinct spiritual presences young, by their energy, but ancient in their dedication. They maintain ritual observances for deities whose names have passed from memory but whose power persists in root and leaf. One cannot help but wonder: Is this death or transformation? Sacrifice or ascension? Perhaps in the end, for the truly devoted, there is no difference."

Visitors to the preserve sometimes report strange experiences. Flowers that bloom in response to whispered prayers. Mushrooms that fruit in patterns resembling ancient texts. A figure glimpsed between the trees, covered in moss and crowned with tiny red-capped fungi, moving with the slow purpose of growing things.

The shopping complex was built elsewhere, three miles down the valley. It failed within two years, the buildings now empty and being slowly reclaimed by creeping vines and ambitious saplings.

Meanwhile, in the grove where the old shrine stands, Fernwick continues their eternal service. Three souls in one body, tending to gods whose names are lost but whose essence persists in every seed that sprouts, every flower that blooms, every mushroom that rises from decay to begin the cycle anew.

The purple hollow pulses with light at dawn and dusk, the two small spirits within performing their own miniature ceremonies. They dance between crystal formations that have grown to resemble tiny altars, leaving offerings of condensed starlight and crystallized prayer. Sometimes, very rarely, they manage to manifest outside the hollow two small ghosts tending to the flowers at Fernwick's base, adjusting the mushrooms into more perfect circles, maintaining the shrine that they, themselves, have become.