These images form a quiet, almost tender counterpoint to the earlier series of stone tablets abandoned in the desert canyon. Where the first collection spoke of revelation shattered and forgotten under a merciless sun, this second sequence whispers of scripture reclaimed, softened, and half-absorbed by living green. The medium has changed from unyielding rock to fragile, yellowed parchment; the setting from arid desolation to a dense, humid thicket of thorn and leaf. The pages are no longer proclamations hurled down from a mountaintop; they are secrets caught in the undergrowth, as if the word of God had fallen like seed into fertile soil and begun to sprout in unexpected ways. The opening photograph presents a thorny nest cradling five loose sheets of parchment, each curled at the edges and scorched amber by age. The thorns are black and vicious, yet they cradle the pages with surprising delicacy, forming a natural reliquary. Sunlight filters through the canopy in pale green shards, catching on the raised veins of the leaves and the faint embossing of the text. The largest sheet, center-frame, bears a heading in ornate capitals—“A JEANT”—followed by a paragraph that begins coherently enough: “Liat hain harnt oft the fetallis of yom call he int Utendertal fate of the a thesey of jesical.” The sentence quickly unravels into a lattice of pseudo-archaic English, half-remembered biblical cadences twisted into dreamlike nonsense. Another sheet, tilted to the left, is titled “TERCIT” and offers a mock genealogy: “The Enflesse ten hed fulcuma of The Raleved Figne Stette.” The text is printed in a typeface that mimics Gutenberg-era blackletter, but the words themselves refuse to resolve into meaning, creating the sensation of reading scripture through a fever. The second image zooms closer, isolating three pages pinned to a single branch like specimens. The central sheet is titled “A JEANT” again, but the text beneath is different, as though each fragment carries its own corrupted version of the same lost original. The left page, labeled “TERCIT,” continues its fractured narrative: “The Enflesse ten hed fulcuma…” The right page, “HTEALNY,” dissolves into a torrent of invented vocabulary: “Ba Faere cige ff Chaunt the shor regge.” The parchment is so thin that the green light behind it bleeds through, turning the ink translucent and the thorns into dark silhouettes. A single droplet of water clings to a leaf, magnifying a tiny portion of text into legibility for a moment—“the vengeance ce tli”—before the angle shifts and the words vanish again. The third frame introduces a scroll, unrolled just enough to reveal two columns of text beneath the heading “HOLY SCIPTURE.” The left column begins with a plausible invocation—“On Hes dayn the men lis yd pres foun of thoe thon”—before sliding into gibberish. The right column, titled “AOUSMYTE,” is denser, its lines packed tight as ivy: “The finger lyntes a clor of the fie Lidsmofull the wcerbe a the att lere ales for Rack chevsing for faar.” The scroll is pinned open by a thorn that pierces the parchment clean through, a small act of violence that feels almost ceremonial. The background is a blur of emerald and lime, the kind of light that exists only in the heart of a forest at noon, where every leaf is a stained-glass window. The fourth image is the most elaborate: two scrolls lie side by side, their ends rolled tight and their middles splayed open like wings. The left scroll is headed “THRCIAN” and “TREION,” the right “THLIAN” and “FOTIAN.” The text is printed in a faux-medieval script, complete with flourished initials and mock-Latin abbreviations. A sample from “THRCIAN” reads: “T Yest Rone Radolier Whers embite schalfore ving T with scoth The Thre Lives Y with mony heghenes the Isthian Lae.” The facing page continues the thought in a different key: “If I speake in the tongues of men and of angels…” before veering into pure invention. The scrolls rest on a bed of moss, and the thorns that frame them are now intertwined with delicate white blossoms, as if the same plant that wounds also flowers. The fifth photograph is intimate, almost claustrophobic. A single scroll, half-unrolled, is wedged into a fork of the thornbush. The parchment is so brittle that it has begun to tear along the creases, and the text is printed in a delicate italic that mimics handwritten marginalia. The heading is simple—“The King Emeth”—followed by a paragraph that starts with deceptive clarity: “James Emeth the king was a man of great faith…” before dissolving into a thicket of nonsense: “but he found the thornes of the rose and the sting of the bee.” The scroll is backlit by a shaft of sunlight that turns the parchment translucent, revealing the ghost of text on the reverse side, as though the words had bled through from another world. The sixth image returns to the open-book format, but now the pages are larger, almost folio-sized, and the text is set in two columns beneath the heading “HOLY SCRIPTURE” on the left and “HIPLIASTY” on the right. The left page begins with a mock psalm: “Early dawn sweet Father Hod edge of the sword…” The right page offers a parody of Pauline rhetoric: “Whourd bline hoed henliing line ith fining.” The book is propped open by the thorns themselves, which have grown through the gutter and emerged on the other side, binding the pages in a living spine. A single yellow butterfly has landed on the lower margin, its wings casting tiny shadows across the text. The penultimate frame is the most serene. Two pages lie flat on the ground, half-covered by fallen leaves and framed by a lattice of thorns that forms a perfect rectangle. The left page is titled “PAIEI MOST FORTURE,” the right “HOLY FRICOTURE.” The text is printed in a clean Roman typeface, but the content is as opaque as ever: “Tell about most holy discovering the sacred…” The parchment has begun to compost at the edges, the ink fading into the earth, and tiny green shoots are pushing up through the fibers, as if the words themselves were germinating. The final image is a revelation in miniature. A single sheet, no larger than a postcard, is pinned to a thorn by a single drop of dew. The heading reads “THE LOST VERSE,” and the text beneath is only three lines long: “And in the end the thorn became the rose / the word became the leaf / and the silence spoke.” The letters are crisp, almost modern, and for the first time the words make sense. The parchment is pristine, the dew acting as a lens that magnifies the text into perfect clarity. Behind it, the thicket has opened into a small clearing where sunlight pours down in a golden column, illuminating the page like a spotlight. The thorns around it have retreated, leaving only a delicate arch of green. Taken together, the series traces a quiet arc from violence to reconciliation. The thorns that once guarded the desert tablets now cradle the parchment with something approaching tenderness. The text, still unreadable in its particulars, has moved from proclamation to meditation, from law to lyric. The forest is not erasing the scripture; it is digesting it, turning the rigid word into something organic, mutable, alive. Where the canyon spoke of exile and entropy, the thicket speaks of return and renewal. The final image, with its legible “lost verse,” suggests that meaning is not lost but transformed—that the divine word, scattered and torn, has found its way back into the world not as commandment but as quiet presence, written in the language of leaf and thorn.