Whiterock Cliffs - October 10th, 2025
I sighed, dropping my pack onto the ground in the clearing. The forest buzzed around us, a droning chorus that made the mountains feel older than they had any right to. Folklore ran deep here in my mountain homeland, deep as roots through the rocky skin of Appalachia.
James Corven, one of the brothers behind Corvid’s Nest Research, came to me with this latest piece of Appalachian folklore: a settlement nested somewhere in the Smoky Mountains, where a community of Welsh druids had lived in secret since before 1492.
I had nearly laughed him out of my inbox. Welsh druids, in the highlands of what would become North Carolina?
Unlikely.
Unserious.
Even for what I do.
But Corven kept tacking on zeros. Whatever James thought we'd find up here, it promised enough of a payoff to risk near-bankruptcy for the chance to prove it.
Which brings me to this clearing. I'm Dr. Isaac Sands, former professor, field researcher, author, and, according to my daughter-in-law, Temperance, a social media scientist. Currently on expedition along the Tennessee-North Carolina border, looking for the ruins of a Welsh settlement that had no earthly business existing here.
My specialty? I take folklore creatures and forgotten cultures and treat them like field problems for the biology, anthropology, and environmental science students I used to teach. I research the land beneath the story: food webs, terrain, weather, migration routes, hibernation patterns, shelter, and viable breeding populations. Then I use my vlog and podcast to ask why a nine-foot mammal has thirty sightings, not nearly enough vegetation to feed it, and somehow not enough scat to fertilize a houseplant.
Basically, a very technical Bigfoot hunter. Temperance says my blog does better than my scientific papers, but one has to try.
Less than twenty miles northwest of my home in Stratton County, embarrassing if I found something this close after all these years, we bushwhacked through rugged terrain with a team of fourteen.
Corven had suggested a small encampment team. What he assembled stretched that definition to the point of snapping. He had mentioned the specialists and some of the pre-production crew.
He had not mentioned the security team.
Now, some armed security is normal when you drag expensive equipment and excitable academics into the wilderness.
What was not normal was the amount of firepower they brought.
Probably too many movies.
Or not enough of the right ones.
We set up base camp in the cradled arms of two old quartzite and phyllite cliffs, their exposed faces forming a natural fortress wall along one side, just inside the North Carolina border. For a relatively isolated, foreign group, like the legends claimed, it was pretty ideal and defensible.
The cliff tops were almost bare, providing easy access to both stone and sky, elements I understood to be culturally and ritually important for this Druid group. It was a promising, if somewhat ambiguous, sign in this landscape.
A creek split the twin cliff faces, where the center had gradually sunk into the creek's current path, conveniently giving a fresh water source to the forest floor that lay beneath them.
"Dr. Nageshi, Dr. Jones? Why don't y'all stick together and scout around the first couple layers of trees," I said. "Maybe there's some interesting plant life, or some sort of boundary marker that might indicate habitation further down the creek."
Nageshi nodded and gestured for Dr. Jones to lead them on, heading away from us toward the southeast.
"Dr. Ramirez, stick with Dr. Petrovya; she might need a spotter if she finds a decent enough cave to explore."
Petrovya rolled her eyes with the expression of someone who thought she'd be slowed down by the partner. But having the practical and the more academic researchers paired together was the best bet for giving context to anything we'd find.
Petrovya swore in her native tongue as she and Ramirez walked away. Amusement creased the corners of my eyes and turned the corners of my mouth as Ramirez quirked an eyebrow and said something I'd bet was equally ineloquent in Russian back to her.
As the teams of scientists went their merry way, the security team silently fanned out and set up a wide perimeter around the camp, leaving me alone in the clearing, gazing up at the towering rock faces that might have once cradled this small congress of Druid settlers.
Brushing a handkerchief across my brow, a well-practiced habit after many years of field research, I stole a glance toward the sky. It was about noon. I walked and spoke aloud to no one in particular.
"If I were a strange druid in a strange land... how big would I build..."
I felt a shift under my boot as a rock shifted under the weight of my step.
I bent down and brushed the dirt away, uncovering a sizable chunk of rock that was a match for the rock walls behind me, apart from some staining from its time half-buried in the dirt. Looking at where I had pulled it from the earth, I started to notice even more chunks of rock, ranging from the size of a fist to the size of a head. It hit me: I was staring at a deliberate, if not perfectly formed, circular structure. A cairn. This rabbit hole just got a lot deeper. And a hell of a lot more interesting.
I stood up and moved away from the circle of stones, my bones buzzing. Not the time to jump to conclusions on what we'd found; instead, time to do things by proper procedure. It was time to consult either Dr. Ramirez, our Celtic culture expert, or Dr. Jones, our Celtic linguist. Ramirez was well out of sight near the cliff faces. However, Nageshi's eccentric outfit made him easy to spot in the tree line. That suggested Dr. Jones, the linguist, was also nearby.
Near the tree line, Dr. Kai Nageshi crouched by an old oak, his gaze intent upon the undergrowth. A striking, willowy figure, Nageshi's silhouette was part academic, part bohemian madness, as if you tossed both concepts in a trunk and shook hard. His eyes met mine as he turned his head, adjusted his round glasses, and stroked his beard thoughtfully.
"Doctor Sands, do you happen to know what plant life typically co-propagates with oak trees such as these?"
I grunted in thought myself. "Well, laurel, ferns are pretty common, clover... What are you getting at, Nageshi?"
With a turn, he let his sash and jacket tails sweep the thick carpet of underbrush as he glanced over his shoulder. "Now, what about these?" he asked, pointing to a cluster of pale white flowers that looked similar to long, ethereal churchwarden pipes.
"No laurel... even the ferns are a bit sparse. Also, I've seen wolfsbane and oakmoss." He gestured widely around the tree and himself.
"Wolfsbane? Like against-werewolves stuff?" I'd never heard of that growing locally.
"It's incredibly odd. Dr. Sands, there's something off about this area. These plants don't grow here, not in these quantities at least," he mused, slapping one of the trunks. "É possível..."
He peered over his glasses at me. "Deliberate manipulation. Someone has purged the natural flora here," he said, his voice low. "Planted only what suited them."
"Or maybe they didn't know the local flora," I offered. "Brought in familiar plants, hoping they'd take root."
Nageshi slapped a hand against the trunk, ready to build on that thought.
A hollow thump answered.
We both looked at the tree.
Nageshi cocked his head. "How curious." He raised his open palm and repeated the motion, causing a similar hollow response.
Gently, with the caution of a man disarming a bomb, Nageshi tugged a piece of the rough, jigsaw-like bark, and it broke free, revealing... nothing.
No wood. No core. Just... empty.
I stepped closer with my pocket flashlight and aimed its beam into the hole that Nageshi had opened, and it seemed to swallow the beam whole. Tilting at different angles, I could make out the backsides of the bark on the other sides of the tree, but nothing beyond that.
No heartwood, no sapwood, not even a splinter to suggest that this had ever had those elements as an oak tree.
A hollowed-out pantomime of life.
Margaret Jones, the linguist and youngest member of our research team, joined us next to the tree. She saw the flashlight pointed into the tree and quirked her eyebrow.
"Take a look. Someone made a tree."
She looked inside.
She caught my wrist and redirected the beam. "Hold it steady, please," she quipped at me, engrossed in what she was looking at.
As she worked, I looked over my shoulder to Nageshi. "Well, plants are your thing. Ever seen anything like this?"
Nageshi gave a shrug. "I have not. In this case, I defer to the environmental scientists' experience."
"Perhaps you should defer to the linguist instead," Jones spoke up from her position at the hole. She'd taken the penlight by then, and I was happy to let her have it and retrieve my hand. "Because this hollowed-out tree isn't natural; it's deliberate. There's a script etched into the back of the bark pieces. Latin, if I had to guess."
"Latin?" Nageshi arched a brow under his wide-brimmed hat.
She turned back to us and crossed her arms, a thoughtful expression settling across her face. "Well, Latin characters. I think this is more likely a case of 'It's easier to adapt than design.'"
I looked at her in confusion, and then understanding. "Ah. So a phonetic transliteration, then?"
"If we're lucky, yes. Then it'd be simple enough to reconstruct the Welsh." She looked at the hole in the side of the tree. "If we're lucky. It's deliberate either way. Almost like a disguised marker..."
She furrowed copper brows at that thought, and suddenly we locked eyes.
"Dr. Sands, do you have something to write with?"
I blinked and reached into the cargo pocket at my knee, pulling out my journal and pen. By the time I had the page open, Jones had handed the flashlight to Nageshi and positioned him beside the hollow, angling the beam across the inside of the bark. She held her phone close to the opening, trying to catch the inscriptions.
She called out the letters she could see, and I tried to keep up, jotting each letter and slash as quickly as she gave them.
When she finished, she waved me closer, impatient, as if the translation might smolder out before she could catch it.
I held out the journal. She scanned the letters she had dictated.
"There we are," she said, her voice softening slightly. "Yes. Druwidon webis wargo yn erbyn eraill, kutti h'svan, hud yn kutti, wiro-cord... un dal, weid widmitom llybr yb di dogel."
I blinked at her, the mountain breeze tugging at her copper hair and carrying her perfume toward me. "Sounds like someone carved... something," I said slowly, "but-"
"But you're not a linguist." She cut me off with a teasing lilt, though there was a proud edge to her smile. "It's not one-for-one, that's for sure. Several words are... weird. Even for Brythonic. But off the cuff? I think we're on the right track for phonetic transliteration."
She frowned at the scribbled letters on the page. "Like I'm not sure about wiro-cord, or this widmitom. But it seems like some sort of protection charm? A ward?"
I looked thoughtfully at the tree, then toward the cliffs. "Staking a claim, maybe?" I suggested. "In a less mystical sense."
She flushed slightly, whether from indignation or embarrassment, I couldn't tell.
She cleared her throat, as if brushing the moment aside. "Yes, well. Let's not take the magic out of linguistics," she said. "Dry enough as it is."
She turned back toward the tree, her voice steady but reverent. "Let's see if I've got it right. Trios un di fenno..."
I frowned as the forest around us stilled, as if the ancient words themselves muffled the world.
"...Druwidon webis wargo yn erbyn eraill, kutti h'svan, hud yn kutti, wiro-cord, un dal, weid widmitom llybr yb di dogel."
She'd barely finished the word when the wind answered her.
A sudden gust tore through the clearing. Dust lifted from the trail and struck my face, sharp enough to make me turn away.
I felt the first pop before I heard it, a sharp crack from the hollowed-out bark.
"It's coming down!" I shouted.
I put myself between Jones and the tree as the hollow shell split loose. It struck my back and almost drove me to my knees, raining bark and dust around us.
The earth pitched violently under my feet, sending me tumbling backward. I landed hard, sliding into the gaping crater where the tree's root ball had once been.
Above me, the sky filled with the chaotic blur of birds scattering in every direction. Their panicked flight barely registered before a deep, guttural roar shook the air. It wasn't just a sound. I felt it in my bones, like the ground itself was growling.
Jones slid down the slope toward me, her face streaked with tears. The roar had taken something out of her. The confidence was gone, stripped away so completely that for a moment she looked like someone I had never met.
Then, silence. A suffocating, unnatural stillness.
From somewhere near the cliffs, a human scream tore through the quiet, a high, agonized sound that made my blood run cold.
"We need to get over there," I said, scrambling to my feet, the adrenaline surging as I started for the path.