12. Wren
WREN
IT’S NOT A BAD CAMERA, IT’S MAGIC
The morning light in the office is less of a glow and more of a dusty intrusion.
It filters through the grime-streaked windows, catching the dancing motes of a century’s worth of paper decay.
I’m sitting on the floor, surrounded by ledgers, trying to make the math of the Cassidy Lodge’s survival look like something other than a slow-motion car crash.
My phone vibrates against my thigh, a relentless reminder that the Bigfoot Hotline is the only reason we have guests filling the lodge.
I don’t answer it. Instead, I look at the photograph I printed late last night.
It’s from the North Ridge camera, and in it, Rowan is a vertical smear of brown and gray against a backdrop of perfectly crisp hemlock needles.
“It’s not the shutter speed,” I mutter to the empty room. My father taught me how to maintain these cameras. He was obsessive about the calibration. The equipment is fine. The forest is fine. It’s the subject that’s broken.
I hear the heavy, rhythmic thud of boots on the porch outside.
Most guests walk with a certain tentative lightness, as if they’re afraid the wood might give way under their tactical hiking gear.
Rowan walks like he owns gravity. I scramble to my feet, brushing dust from my jeans and smoothing down my hair.
I hurry out the side door before he can decide to just walk through a wall.
He’s standing by the woodpile, glaring at a drone that’s hovering about fifty yards away near the trailhead.
There’s a tension in his shoulders that suggests he’s considering the aerodynamics of a well-aimed log.
He’s wearing the shirt again. It’s stretched tight across his chest, the cotton slightly faded from what I suspect is a very aggressive washing technique.
I make a mental note to give him a couple more, since it seems to be his favorite item of clothing.
“Don’t,” I say, stepping onto the grass. “That drone costs more than my car. If you swat it, the owner will sue us, and I’m already two lawsuits away from living in a tent.”
Rowan doesn’t look at me. His eyes stay fixed on the buzzing plastic insect. “It’s looking for me. It has been over that ridge four times this morning. It’s persistent.”
“It’s digital. It doesn’t have persistence; it has a battery life and a guy named Tyler from Seattle who thinks he’s going to win a Peabody for filming a blurry shoulder.
” I walk closer, stopping just outside the circle of personal space he maintains like a physical border.
“Which brings me to my question. Why is it always a blurry shoulder?”
He finally turns his head, his expression his usual brand of ancient, unbothered granite. “The equipment is faulty.”
“The equipment is a twelve-hundred-dollar mirrorless rig with a stabilized lens,” I say, holding up my phone.
“The trail cameras are top-of-the-line. I checked the one from the ridge. The trees are in 4K resolution. You look like you were painted by an Impressionist with a head injury. Explain the physics, Rowan. I have an art history degree; I’m used to people lying to me about what they see. ”
Rowan sighs, a sound like wind moving through dry leaves. He gestures toward the deep timber, away from the lodge and the tourists and the buzzing drone. “Come. If you wish to understand, you must see the failure of the mechanism.”
We walk in silence for twenty minutes. Rowan doesn’t use the trails.
He moves through the undergrowth with a terrifying lack of effort, his stride making my frantic pace feel like a desperate scramble.
He stops at a small outcropping of basalt, a place where the forest opens up just enough to let the sun hit the moss in bright, jagged patches.
“Look at the stone,” he says, pointing to a flat section of rock. “Tell me what you see.”
I squint. “It’s a rock, Rowan. It’s gray and has some lichen on it. Probably a five on the geological excitement scale.”
He doesn’t respond. He simply stands there, his hands loose at his sides.
Then, something shifts. I can’t quite explain what happens, except that it feels like a thought I’ve just forgotten—a sudden, smooth sliding of my attention.
My gaze tracks to a fern three feet to the left, then to a squirrel on a branch.
My eyes refuse to settle on the rock. It isn’t that the rock is gone, but my brain seems to have decided that the rock is the most boring thing in the universe and would rather I look at literally anything else.
“Stop that,” I say, my voice sounding shrill to my own ears.
I force my gaze back. It takes a physical effort, a pressure behind my eyes that feels like trying to read in the dark.
The rock is there, but it’s shimmering, the edges soft and indistinct as if I’m looking through a thick pane of recycled glass.
“It is an influence,” Rowan says, his voice coming from the shimmering space. “A redirection. Human perception is a shallow pool. It is easy to create a ripple that moves the eye elsewhere. Your cameras work on the same principles of light and focus. If the focus is told to slide, it slides.”
I pull my phone out, my fingers trembling slightly as I open the camera app.
On the screen, the rock is a gray blur. The trees behind it are clear enough to count the needles, but the space where Rowan stands is a smudge of nothing.
It looks like a thumbprint on the lens, except the thumbprint moves when I move the phone.
“Is it magic?” I ask, my thumb hovering over the shutter button. “Because if it’s magic, I have to rethink my entire stance on the Enlightenment.”
“It takes effort.” He steps toward me, and the shimmering intensifies.
Sweat sheens his face, a few beads forming on his forehead, and his jaw is locked.
“It’s not a passive trait. It is a weight I must hold.
Every camera, every set of eyes, every drone and trampling tourist adds to that weight.
I must choose to hold the veil. I must choose the scope. ”
He exhales slowly, and the world snaps back into focus. The rock is just a rock again. A deep, structural fatigue has taken over Rowan’s features. He leans against a cedar tree, gripping the bark with his hand.
“Wait,” I say, my brain finally catching up to the part of me that’s currently screaming in existential terror. “You said you choose the scope. Does that mean you can hide... anything?”
“Within limits,” he says. “I can steer a hiker off a trail and make them believe the path they seek is twenty yards to the north. I can hide my home, my hives, and the places where the earth is quiet. But it’s a tool of precision. A needle, not a blanket.”
I look back toward the lodge, hidden behind the rise of the hill. “Why don’t you just hide the whole trailhead? If you can make people slide off, why are we dealing with guys like Tyler and his drone?”
Rowan looks at me, his eyes dark and heavy.
“Because I’m one man, Wren Cassidy. I can’t herd a hundred people at once.
The more minds I must influence, the thinner the veil becomes.
If I try to cover the forest, I’ll cover nothing.
I would break under the weight of so many eyes looking for something that’s not there. ”
I study the photo I just took. It’s a masterpiece of nothing, just a gray blob in a green field. I’ve spent weeks laughing at these photos, posting snarky captions about camera malfunctions and forest ghosts to bait the very people who are currently draining Rowan’s strength.
“So every time a tourist catches a glimpse of a blurry man in the woods...” I start, the realization settling in my stomach like lead.
“It’s because I was tired,” Rowan finishes. “Or because there were too many of them for me to manage. The legends are built on my failures, not my existence.”
He pushes off the tree, his movements slow and deliberate.
He looks like a man who has been carrying a mountain on his back forever and only just realized the mountain is getting heavier.
The drone buzzes in the distance again, a tiny, annoying reminder of the digital age pressing in on his ancient silence.
“Is it getting harder?” I ask, my voice softer now. I want to make a joke to crack the tension, but it feels wrong, like telling a joke at a funeral. “With the hotline. The viral stuff. Is it more weight than before?”
Rowan doesn’t answer immediately. He looks up at the canopy, watching the way the light breaks through the branches. “The world is louder than it was when your great-great-grandmother named me. There are more eyes now. More glass lenses that do not blink. It is... persistent.”
His words land like a physical blow. I think about the call logs and the thousands of red notifications blooming across my screen like a rash. I thought I was saving the lodge. I thought I was playing a clever game where nobody got hurt because the monster wasn’t real.
But the monster is real. He’s standing in front of me, wearing a twenty-four-dollar T-shirt, and he’s exhausted from trying to stay invisible while I scream his location into a megaphone.
“I should go back.” I don’t look at him. I can’t. “Marge will have lunch ready, and I have... I have work to do.”
“The survey?” he asks, a faint trace of his dry humor returning. “The counting of the moss?”
“Something like that.” I start walking, my father’s boots feeling heavier than usual.
I don’t trip once on the way down, too focused on the weight of the phone in my pocket, and the responsibility that’s currently rewriting every line of my business plan to think about the stupid lace that keeps untying itself.