Bagri had found their cabin while doing a missing persons sweep of the forest. Einer hadn't been there, but Bagri had described the event in so much vivid detail when he got home that he felt almost like he had been. His eyes bright and his hands shaking as he scowered for a listing on a real estate site.
His 4-wheeler coming to a stop in the small clearing, Einer had imagined him putting on the goofy park ranger hat he normally wore hanging by it's chin strap around his neck. The silver grass had crunched under his boots. The singing. Bagri had always been able to hear it in those woods, but he could finally make out the words when he stood on that door step. He couldn't remember the words when he recounted the story, but he said it was okay with a manic grin because they weren't for Einer to know.
Einer wasn't one of the forest's like him. He never heard the singing. Not when he stood at it's heart sobbing for it's help, not when Bagri and his coworkers stood still to just listen to the siren song that had brought them there, not when Bagri or Echo sang with it.
The cabin had no curtains or blinds, but every room was furnished. Bagri had completely filled his phone's SD card and internal storage with pictures. Obsessively documentimg every detail he could from the windows. Bagri had said it was Home like he was speaking of a lost city.
He found the corpses in the bedroom. His missing persons. One with their bones gnawed so thoroughly that Einer had had trouble recognizing the gore as belonging to a human when Bagri showed him the photos, the other looking like they'd just fallen asleep with their head resting where the splatter's belly should be.
Bagri came back to himself the next day.
Einer had had to delete the photos for him because he couldn't handle meat on his plate or graphic deaths in movies, he certainly couldn't handle several gigabytes of corpses in his home.
He still called it home.
They still bought the place and moved in as soon as the investigation was over.
Einer knew he didn't have a say in the matter, the forest and Bagri had already decided and he could fall in line or lose his husband of a month and a half to the trees.
