the Vanished Girl didn't stop at the edge of the forest. what we knew of the forest before was still a retreat, the hikikomori(kei) impulse is toward the hermitage (which is a place you flee to) and frequency-blocking machines are assembled in the first clearing you find because you're still close enough to the road to believe fleeing will save you; the Vanished Girl believed it would save her and the signal still followed.

now what she finds is that the forest was already written before she arrived, the ground beneath her has a name in a language no one around her speaks: dolec, place in the valley, given by Sorbian settlers in the eighth century to a floodplain that flooded & flooded & never became anything other than what it was. the name predates the castle, the gatehouse, the villa, the motorway, the exhibition and the frequency blocking machines; it predates the angelic prison entirely because the hollow in the earth does not need our eschatology.

the forest is a palimpsest and it is already saturated with the logic that the Vanished Girl thought she was escaping. and underneath all of that and older than all of that too is something that came before all of this entirely. she doesn't know if she can read this and she goes deeper anyway.