The village of Brindlewood stood at the edge of an ancient forest where daylight seldom lingered. Though the townsfolk busied themselves with fields and trade, no one dared cross the tree line once dusk began to bleed across the sky. For as long as anyone could remember, people who ventured into the woods at night did not return—save for one or two who did, but came back changed. They whispered nonsense, smeared with moss and blood, their eyes hollow as caves.Elara knew these stories well. The villagers told them to their children the way others might tell bedtime tales. But Elara was not like the others. She was the village herbalist’s daughter, and the forest called to her with a voice soft as breath. Every evening, as she ground herbs in her mother’s cottage by the window, she would see shadows flutter between the trees—not shaped like animals, but like something trying to remember what it once was.Her mother forbade her to go near the forest’s edge. “That place drinks the light,” she said. “It remembers every soul that walks beneath its branches.”But Elara’s fascination grew with every whispered warning. What could make a place remember?One autumn night, when the moon was sharp and silver as a blade, a knock came at their cottage door. It was the innkeeper, pale and panting. “A hunter’s gone missing,” he gasped. “The forest swallowed him up near Hollow Creek.”Elara’s mother gathered her satchel of herbs. “Stay here,” she commanded. “I’ll go with the searchers.” But once the door closed behind her, Elara felt the forest’s pull again, stronger than ever—like invisible fingers curling around her heart.She lit a lantern and slipped quietly into the cold night.The trees rose from the mist like pillars of smoke. Their bark glistened wet and black, their roots coiling through the damp earth like buried serpents. The air smelled of rot and whispering leaves. Elara stepped carefully, feeling the moss sponge beneath her boots.Then she heard it.A voice—no, several voices at once—whispering her name. They came from nowhere and everywhere, slipping into her ears like threads of wind.“Elara…”She spun, holding the lantern high. The light caught faces half-formed in the bark—noses, lips, hollow eyes that sank back into the wood before she could blink. She stumbled backward, heart pounding.“Elara,” the forest murmured again, “you hear us now.”Her lantern flickered. Then extinguished.Darkness swallowed her whole.For a moment, she froze. Then she realized something impossible—the whispering didn't come through her ears. It was inside her skull, sliding between memories. She could feel the forest touching her thoughts, peeling them like petals.“What are you?” she whispered to the dark.A shape moved ahead. She saw the faint shimmer of moonlight through the trees and began to follow. The ground dipped suddenly into a ravine carpeted with ferns. At its heart stood a pool so black it reflected nothing.And by it knelt the missing hunter.“Elara?” His voice was wrong—too calm, too hollow. As he turned, his face caught the light, and she saw that his eyes were no longer eyes but twin pools of darkness.“You shouldn’t be here,” he said, smiling faintly. “It knows you now.”“What knows me?” she asked.“The Shade.”The word spread through the trees like an echo, whispering from trunk to trunk. The hunter’s body convulsed. His arms jerked upward as black veins crept beneath his skin, bursting through the surface like cracks in porcelain. He screamed once before his mouth tore wider than it should have, releasing a cloud of shadow that hissed as it took form—a tall, featureless being woven from smoke and bone-white light.Elara stumbled back. The Shade’s head tilted as if curious. Its eyes were pits of swirling ash.Then it spoke, but not aloud. Its words bloomed directly in her mind, colder than stone.“I have watched you, child of light,” it said. “Your heart stirs my hunger.”Elara gripped her pendant—a small rune her mother had given her, carved from elderwood. “Stay back,” she breathed, feeling a warmth build in the charm.The Shade drew nearer, drifting rather than walking, the ground beneath it blackening like charred paper. “You seek knowledge,” it said. “But knowledge is the first step to belonging to me.”The warmth in the pendant flared. For a heartbeat, she saw the forest around her—not as it was, but as it remembered itself: thousands of souls trapped in bark and stream, their faces frozen in silent screams. Every tree, every vine, every root was someone who had once listened to the whispering voice.She realized then what her mother had meant. The forest didn’t just drink the light—it was the light it had consumed, bound into endless shadow.Elara turned to flee, but roots surged from the ground, coiling around her ankles. She fell hard, her lantern shattering beside her.The Shade bent close, its edges dissolving in mist. “Give me your fear,” it murmured. “And I will let you see what lies beneath your name.”“No,” Elara whispered, struggling against the roots. “You will not take me.”Something broke inside her pendant—a small crack that released a faint shimmer. A thread of golden light unraveled, winding up her arm. It seared the roots to ash. The Shade hissed, recoiling.Elara rose, the pendant’s glow brightening until it chased the darkness a few paces back. “You are bound by memory,” she said, her voice trembling but steady. “You live because they remember you. I will forget you.”The forest stopped whispering. Even the wind froze mid-breath.The Shade’s form rippled violently. “You cannot unmake remembrance,” it snarled. “You are born of it.”But Elara closed her eyes and began to think of everything—not the forest, not the hunter, not the voices—but of home. Her mother’s hands. The scent of sage. The sky before sunrise. With every image, the whispering dimmed.When she opened her eyes, the Shade was gone. The forest was silent.Elara stumbled through the trees until the first light of dawn touched her face. She fell to the earth and wept.By the time the searchers found her, she could barely speak. They carried her back to Brindlewood, murmuring prayers. The other villagers begged her to tell them what she had seen, but Elara only shook her head. “There’s nothing there,” she said. “Just trees and silence.”But that night, as she lay in bed, she heard it again—soft as breath against her ear.“Elara…”She clutched her cracked pendant, now dark and cold. Outside, the trees swayed, though no wind moved them.In the morning, she was gone.Some say she was taken by the Shade. Others whisper that she became its new voice. But when travelers pass near Brindlewood, they claim to hear a woman’s voice among the rustling leaves—gentle, sorrowful, and calling softly for someone who no longer remembers her name.
