The Darkwood Legacy: Lost Confessions

The tree is gone.

Its confessions are not.

For generations, people came to the Confession Tree carrying the things they could never tell another living soul. They believed the tree would take their guilt.

They never understood what it was taking with it.

Now the Darkwood Legacy reaches beyond the hollow.

A mirror holds something that refuses to...

They cut down the Confession Tree. They should have left it standing.

For generations, people came to the old oak at the crossroads to confess the things they could no longer live with. Murder. Betrayal. Secrets buried so deep that even their families never knew.

The tree listened. And it kept every word.

Now the oak is gone, its trunk cut into...

THE WOOD ALWAYS REMEMBERS

In 1811, Jonathan Pierce made a bargain with something older than the earth and meaner than anything rumored to be in the mountains for centuries, a Confession Tree rooted deep in the Appalachian dark. He fed it his wife. His sons. His soul. When he finally paid in full, the Tree filed him away in its wood, patient and...

A Darkwood Legacy Lost Confessions Short Story

Three people have died in Heron Creek, North Carolina in three months. A volunteer firefighter walks into a controlled burn. An eight-year-old drowns in fourteen inches of water. A woman drives to an overlook at two in the morning and doesn’t come back. When investigator Mara Ellison arrives, she...

THE SHEPHERD

Father Eldon Marsh knows what evil looks like when it’s trying to hide.

He sealed something beneath a ridge in Watauga County, North Carolina thirty-eight years ago and drove away before sunrise. The county records showed an empty lot. The seal held. He didn’t go back.

Until now.

The lot isn’t empty anymore. There’s a church on the...

The Confession Tree doesn’t just take the guilty. It cultivates them. Reuben Carrow spent thirty years believing he was the keeper of the Confession Tree. He tended the land, walked the sinners to the ridge, and told himself the taking was part of the balance. The tree never corrected him. It had no reason to. Not yet.

Some debts don’t get called...

A year after Caleb Raines was buried, he knocks on his mother’s door.

He is cold, barefoot, and caked in cemetery mud. He calls Nora by a name only Caleb knew. He remembers the last morning she saw him alive.

Grief tells her to let him in.

At McGlendin Gap Cemetery, caretaker Elaine Carver has troubles of her own. Grass is dying in branching...

Forty-three cursed objects were carved from the Confession Tree.

No one counted the scraps.

Cal Mercer sees nothing dangerous in the oak piled behind Malcolm Cross’s workshop. It is dry, seasoned, and perfect for a wet weekend at Pine Hollow Campground. When he finds families struggling to light their fires, Cal does what he has always done. He...