Snow fell early that year.
Elias Rowan stood outside his cottage, staring at the barren fields where golden wheat should have been swaying in the cold wind. Instead, the soil had turned gray, cracked like the skin of something long dead.
He knelt and grabbed a handful of dirt
It crumbled like ash
"Impossible…" he muttered.
Elias had farmed this land for twenty years. Through droughts and floods, storms and sickness, the soil had always provided. But now something had changed.
Behind him, the door creaked open.
"Elias," said his wife Mara, wrapping a wool shawl around her shoulders. "The livestock won't eat."
Elias frowned.
"What do you mean they won't eat?"
"They just… stare."
That was when Elias noticed the ring again
The crimson stone glowed faintly against the pale winter light.
He had tried to remove it once. The metal refused to slide off his finger, as if the ring had grown into his flesh.
At first, he had thought it was simply tight.
Now he wasn't so sure.
"Did you hear that?" Mara whispered.
Elias looked up.
From the edge of the Whispering Forest came a sound.
Not wind.
Not animals.
Something deeper.
Something moving beneath the earth.
The trees shuddered as if something enormous was passing through them.
Then the voice returned.
Soft.
Cold.
Patien.
"The harvest has begun."
Elias felt a chill crawl through his bones.
He had not discovered the ring.
The ring had been waiting for him.
And far beneath the forest, something ancient had just awakened.