Welcome to Tale #1: The Whispering Woods
This is the first of Orin's thirty documented tales. It takes place in Year 847 of the Second Age, in the Whispering Woods of Lyrondale.
Content warnings for this tale:
- ⚠️ Body horror (transformation)
- ⚠️ Loss of identity
- ⚠️ Grief and loss (dead family members)
- ⚠️ Psychological horror
What to know:
- This tale is split into 2 chapters
- It introduces several elements that recur throughout the anthology
- Pay attention to: pale blue light, purple mushrooms, spiral symbols
- Kael's story connects to later tales (#9, #24)
This is one of the darker tales. If you need to skip it, I understand—but the connections it establishes are important.
The Whispering Woods are waiting.
Let's begin.
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Tale #1, Part 1,
Year 862 of the Second Age,
Outskirts ofLyrondale.
Kael had heard the warnings—heard them in every tavern between the coast and Lyrondale's borders.
Do not enter the Whispering Wood after dark.
Do not listen to what the trees tell you
Do not stay longer than a day.
The old-timers always leaned in close when they said it, their breath sour with the cheapest wine they could afford to down for one bit of coin, their eyes watery but insistent that what they spoke was truth. Some claimed to have lost brothers to the Woods. Others told stories of entire hunting parties that vanished overnight, leaving behind only their dogs howling at the forest's edge.
But warnings sadly were for men who still had something to lose, and Kael had lost everything three Thawmonths ago—his farm to his drinking debt, his wife to fever, his son to the war that never seemed to end. His boy had been barely sixteen when the conscription officers came through their village, taking every young male who could hold a sword.
Kael had received a single letter, written in his son's careful hand, describing the mud and cold of the northern front. Then nothing. Just silence... stretching on and on like a wound that refused to close.
All that remained for him now in the world was the rumor of the Architect's Hoard, a fortune so great in ancient gold it was myth now, buried somewhere at the heart of the Whispering Woods, left by some long-dead noble who had built half of Old Lyrondale before vanishing without trace.
The stories, as it always does in Eldoria, disagreed on the details. Some said that the Architect had been driven mad by grief, others that he had uncovered forbidden knowledge meant for the gods alone. But they all agreed on one thing—he had carried all his wealth into the Woods and had never returned.
Kael needed that gold. Needed it with a desperation so great that it had hollowed out his chest from within and left him sleepless unless half-drowned in ale. With that fortune, he could start again.
Maybe travel East, where they said the war hadn't reached yet. Maybe find a new trade, a new life. Something.. anything to forget the sound of his wife's last breath rattling in her lungs, or the way his son had looked back at him from the conscription wagon, trying so hard to be brave.
But that thoughts quickly went away as the forest's edge appeared so suddenly before him, as if the land had simply decided to stop.
One moment Kael walked through knee-high grass beneath an open sky dotted with the twin moons of Eldoria; the next, he stood before a wall of ancient oaks, their trunks wider than three men lying head to foot. Strange purple mushrooms clustered at their roots, glowing faintly even in the daylight. The canopy above was so dense it swallowed the afternoon sun, leaving only a dim green twilight beyond it.
Then he heard them immediately.
Whispers.
Not words at least not yet, more like the memory of words, the ghost of conversation carried on wind that wasn't blowing. It sounded like a crowd speaking in the next room, just soft enough that you couldn't make out what they were saying, but persistent enough to make your skin prickle.
Kael told himself it was just leaves rustling, branches creaking, the ordinary sounds of any forest. He adjusted his pack, checked that his knife was loose in its sheath, and stepped between the trees.
Then the temperature dropped at once, and then the air grew thick with the smell of loam and rot and something else—something sweet and cloying that reminded Kael of incense burning in the old temple back home.
The light turned strange, filtering through the leaves in shafts of sickly green that seemed to move independent of any breeze. His boots sank deep into a carpet of dead leaves that looked like they'd been laying undisturbed for centuries.
He had been walking for less than an hour when he realized he could almost make out what they were saying. The sounds the trees made had some sort of rhythm, the rise and fall of human speech. He caught fragments: "...turn back..." and "...too late now..." and once clearly "...should have listened..."
"Just the wind," Kael muttered, but his voice sounded small and swallowed by the growing green darkness. His words seemed to vanish the moment they left his mouth, absorbed by the forest itself.
He pressed on, following what he hoped was a straight path toward the Woods' center. The trees grew denser as he walked, their branches interlocking overhead into a solid ceiling of leaves and wood. Occasionally he'd pass clearings where those strange purple mushrooms grew in perfect circles, their glow pulsing gently like breathing.
In one such clearing, he found a rusted sword half-buried in the earth, its blade covered in moss. In another, an Ashmirian leather pack so rotted with age that it fell apart when he touched it, spilling nothing but dirt and dead leaves
Other travelers. Other seekers.
And not one had returned.