After a brief moment of anticipation, ruminating over what she'd read and what she'd heard about the supposed hidden subculture of the group among various videos and message boards, Amber mustered the courage to step in her car and drive down the dirt roads to the commune. Her perusal of the digital sphere for information had yielded scattered results. Most opinions on the group were rumors which relied on faint sights and speculations. Some said it was a secluded tribe with quaint rites who simply wanted to live an existence apart from society. Others gave a more messianic bent and said the group was a saving grace to humankind and its societal corruption. Yet others implied the group was a cult with harmful rites and malicious intent, or part of a sprawling conspiracy of ostensibly related communities. There was no general consensus other than a few agreed-upon realities, which were that it consisted entirely of women, that it rejected modernity and embraced a tradition attuned to some primordial order, and that it performed rites of some vaguely pagan nature.

The specifics of the commune's architecture and layout were not well agreed on in these recounts. Some who had glimpsed the small locale behind the wild thicket of trees described falling-apart wooden shacks, others rustic cottages with mahogany paneling, yet others circular and ritualistic stone structures. Some recounts were unsettling, like a post Amber had seen on an archive of some message board from almost a decade ago about a strange woman who took men on dates to a tucked-away park which had a scenic path winding around circular structures built of gray, mossy stone interspersed with exotic plants bearing colorful, variegated leaves. The longer the woman conversed with a particular man as he walked around this park, the slower and more deliberate her voice grew until she finally whispered in his ear to join her inside one of the circular structures. Not wanting to be left alone in a mysterious forest before nightfall, he followed the woman as she pranced into a yawning, mossy portal to a labyrinthine interior where in the darkness lit up by the slight glow of her skin, her mouth opened to reveal two rows of glinting, sharpened teeth. The dew on the leaves of the bushes funneling past Amber reminded her of the glinting tube of an esophagus. When clouds hid the sun the foliage lost its distinct outline, as if she had fallen out of an airplane and was hurtling towards the ground, surrounded on all sides by apparitions.

The air felt blurry that morning, like the paleness of trees months ago in early autumn when she had been walking down the footpaths from the chemical factory to where she had parked her car in a flat area by an embankment of the river Severn. Upon reaching a small tributary of the river, enveloped in hazy patches of fog, she had felt the air pierce the side of her neck. Jerking her head leftward, her eyes had met the penetrating glare of the two gray eyes set in what could have been a stone atop a boulder, but she realized a few seconds later was a face resting, motionless, blending into the stone. Amber had frozen then, still getting her bearings in the fog which had drained all color from the scene, her impulses unsure of what to do next, except to mentally trace the faint figure's outline. A few inches above the eyes she had seen long, thick strands of hair sprouting out like curved strips of bark along the contours of the riverbank. The face, covered in mist as if suds of molten silver, made no discernible motion for several minutes, so out of nervousness Amber had reached into her bag and taken a bright, candy red latex balloon, blown it up in her mouth, and reached over to the boulder in a pathetic gesture of friendliness.

Amber still could not get over how plaintive the girl was when she had taken the balloon and delved her fingers into it as if it were a ball of dough, poking definite impressions into the latex material. Her wordless expression of thanks and silent recession into the shade of trees where Amber had not been able to make out her form no matter how much she squinted her eyes, had been accompanied by a muffled rustle of leaves Amber thought may have hidden a giggle and a reserved smile. She drove past the bushes and past lakes glazed-over with ice, past an alcove where shacks stood in shambles, seeming to have been uninhabited for years if not decades. Now she was resolute in her desire to plumb the locale's secrets, not only to satisfy her curiosity of its culture, but also of the woman she had met by the riverbank. As Amber drove, she imagined herself as a pioneer of a whole new field of esoteric research centered around tucked-away cultures and social mores. She also imagined the legends and speculations she had briefly looked-over about the group, involving bloody sacrificial rites, severed appendages, and faces bathed in terror. This did not scare her, though, when she remembered that colorless face she saw those months ago.