Laura S. Fox
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Hungry Heart - Book #3 - Ch. 6
🕑 Added 2021-12-26 19:00:03 +0000 UTCChapter One / Chapter Two / Chapter Three / Chapter Four / Chapter Five
Chapter Six – Halves of a Whole
“But how could she trample the saplings? Does she have feet?” Toru asked, more and more curious about the wind spirit.
“No, but she has power, and even though she holds no evil in her heart, she can get scared. You see, Toru,” the old witch explained, “Shearah will be forever young.”
“She doesn’t get old? Not even a day?” Toru continued to question. “Maybe that’s why she cannot stand the falling leaves.”
“You are very clever for your years, young tiger,” Shearah praised him, while the others present murmured in agreement. Toru puffed out his chest. “The wind spirit has her faults, all of them coming from her good, yet inexperienced, heart. She tried to climb a peak that is no one’s to climb, and that’s why she had to find shelter inside the old oak when she became too tired.”
“Would she have died if the eagleshifters hadn’t taken her to her place of rest?” Varg was the one to ask a question as well, this time.
“Spirits don’t truly die, but it would have been terrible for her not to have a place from which she could come back to life when someone needed her,” the old witch continued to explain. “As powerful as she is, she still needs the protection of the old oak. There, her soul continues to thrive, even in her sleep.”
“So, the eagleshifters did a good thing,” Toru concluded. “Did she succeed in killing the ugly saplings?” He looked around. There was no need for an answer to that particular question. If Claw’s old friends were trees, and those trees could turn into Vrannes, something of those saplings must have lived on, some way or the other.
“She only managed to hurt them,” Shearah said. “But as I told you, they are hardy creatures, these Vrannes you’re talking about.”
“They didn’t die,” Varg continued her thought. “But what happened next?”
“The hurt saplings began to crawl along the ground. I was witness to their plight and hurried to Shearah to ask her why she would be so cruel toward creatures that needed her so much. She didn’t want to hear me. She kept telling me that they were ugly and disgusting, and that they shouldn’t be here. To my shame, I must admit that I didn’t contradict her at the time. These saplings growing into young trees were indeed a horrendous sight. But being the old witch that I am, I could tell that they weren’t evil.”
“But Vrannes are evil,” Toru insisted. “They took Duril’s arm and killed a lot of people!”
“About that, I am only hearing now,” Shearah said. “And still, why would my old heart tell me that they’re not?”
“Maybe you’re wrong sometimes,” Toru pointed out. “Cannot old witches be wrong?”
Shearah laughed. “I wish I could tell you ‘no’, but let us continue with what happened, and I will let you be the judge of what’s right and what’s wrong after I finish.” She paused for a moment, struggling to remember. “The saplings, or what had grown of them to that point, crawled through the forest. They were scaring everyone with their horrendous appearance. They were small, so only when you got close to them could you see them for what they were, but that didn’t make the fear of those who stumbled upon them any less.”
“Did they start to crawl on people and turn them into trees?” Toru asked. “Because they’re evil?”
Shearah flew into his ear, making him shake his head. “You’re never going to hear the end of what I want to tell you if you keep on interrupting me, young tiger,” she scolded him, but Toru could tell from her voice that she liked him.
“You can talk,” he said, full of importance. The old witch liked him the best, for sure, or else she wouldn’t have chosen to sit on his shoulder. And she even asked him for permission to continue her story, which meant that she had great faith in his judgement.
“Now that I have your blessing,” Shearah said with a small pointed laugh, “let me see what I can still remember from those times. I shouldn’t have trouble remembering, as something happened like no other here, at The Quiet Woods.” Her voice dropped to a mysterious whisper, and everyone craned their neck to hear her better. Toru suspected that the old witch liked the attention as much as he did.
“What happened?” Varg asked impatiently.
“The forest started dying,” Shearah said with a sigh. “It didn’t seem like it was anything unusual, at first. Dry branches, fallen leaves, they’re all part of the life of a forest, here as anywhere else on the face of our world, but they began to multiply.” Toru shivered a little. The old witch surely knew how to tell a story that would put fear into anyone listening. “The forest, for the first time since its inception, began to die.”
“What did the wind spirit do then?” Varg asked. The others must have been all eyes and ears, although Toru couldn’t tell by looking at those trees if they had such things. They had to, or otherwise, they wouldn’t have been able to communicate with them, or recognize Claw as their old-time mate. Claw leaned back, looking focused and tense. The bearshifter was certainly the most affected by these stories about his dear forest. All of this had happened while he was away, and Toru suspected that Claw, by how tight he kept his fists, wished he would have been there, protecting the place of his birth and his friends.
But who was the enemy? Toru found it hard to understand. If the Vranne saplings weren’t evil, who had tried to kill the forest back then when the wind spirit bound to be a child forever had decided they didn’t deserve to live? He scratched his head vigorously as his mind didn’t appear to be of any help on the matter.
“Shearah was devastated,” the old witch continued. “She would work relentlessly, day and night, using her powers to revive the dying trunks, whispering new lives into the fish gasping for air on the river banks. We all wanted to help her, but what was happening was beyond our powers. And people started to perish, as well,” she added, and her voice lowered in anguish. “Shearah couldn’t bring them back to life, so all the humans here started fleeing the forest, afraid that it was cursed.”
“They must have carried that news with them wherever they traveled,” Varg said. “Has anyone come here since that time?”
“You’re our first visitors in a very long time. Indeed, the humans learned to stay clear of a forest where their kind died so easily.”
“But the shapeshifters remained,” Varg pointed out. “How did Shearah succeed in making the forest look like it is now? We know that it goes through a rebirth each dawn, but how is that different from the time when she struggled to revive every tree and creature of the forest?”
“It is different,” the old witch replied. “No matter how much effort Shearah put into keeping The Quiet Woods alive, her work came undone, sometimes under her very eyes.”
“It must have been a painful experience,” Varg said. “To watch her own creations perish, no matter how much she struggled.”
“Yes, and every day, she grew more tired,” Shearah continued. “Her spirit has always been so strong, but even I could tell that it was waning under that burden.”
“What was happening with the ugly saplings?” Toru interjected. “Or the shapeshifters? Beast and Willow?” Claw might have wanted to ask the same things, but he kept silent.
“My memory is failing me,” the old witch said with a deep, heartfelt sigh. “I do remember some things, but they’re like pieces of a canvas that, as much as I try, I fail to piece together into a whole. At the end of a day like many during which Shearah did her best to revive the dying forest, she collapsed under a tree.”
Toru only then realized that he had yet to imagine what the wind spirit looked like. “But is this Shearah like a little girl, with arms and feet?”
“Are you asking me if she has a material body?” the old witch asked. “If that’s the case, I’m afraid that my answer will disappoint you. Shearah has a face, but it is one made of mist.”
“Then how did the old eagleshifters carry her to her place of rest when she finished creating The Quiet Woods the first time?”
“Only those touched by magic can handle spirits,” the old witch explained. “The eagleshifters have it. And it has to be the old kind of magic, born from the cauldron of the world, nothing less.”
“Did they come again when Shearah fell?” Varg questioned. “Since only they can do it.”
The old witch paused and said nothing for a few moments. “As astonishing as it may sound, it was I who carried Shearah back to her old oak.”
“So do you have the old kind of magic?” Toru asked. That old witch was really something. Agatha from Whitekeep might even get a little jealous of her. But what if Agatha also had old magic? She was a cheapskate not to let them know about it, if that was the case.
“I wasn’t aware of it until that time, and even now I’m not sure that I do. The only thing I remember is cupping my palms and catching her sleeping shape in them. I hadn’t meant anything by that at the time except for offering a little comfort, as useless as that might have been. To my surprise, I lifted Shearah from the ground and I could carry her. The only thought I had was to take her to the only place I knew that could heal her.”
Another pause followed, and they all remained silent while pondering over the strange happenings from decades before.
“And after that?” Toru asked impatiently, seeing how none of the others said anything.
“This is where my memory gets shaky. I remember clearly how I placed the wind spirit inside the hollow trunk of the old oak. But then, I must have fallen asleep because nothing of what came next has a place in my mind. When I opened my eyes again, I was in this tiny body and had to learn how to be a lightning bug.”
“So, it happened the next morning?” Toru continued his questions.
“That, I don’t know for sure. I could have been asleep for a day or more, although it didn’t feel like a lot. But I knew that something must have happened because, all of a sudden, the forest was no longer dying around us.”
“But you were a bug. How did you realize that?”
Shearah laughed softly. “How, indeed. First of all, I was enthralled that I could fly, but I had to see my reflection in the waters of the river to understand what I had become. And, right away, I decided to search for the wind spirit and ask her about the forest, if she wasn’t already asleep for centuries to come.”
“Did you find her? At the old oak?” Toru asked.
“Yes, I did. I tried to speak, and only then I came to the appalling realization that I could no longer use my tongue. All that came from my mouth was a buzzing sound. And a bit of an annoying one, on top of that.”
“Yeah, your buzzing is really annoying,” Toru confirmed.
“Toru, let Shearah finish,” Varg warned him, but he grinned, a sign that he found that amusing, despite his words sounding like a rebuke.
The old witch didn’t wait to be told twice. “I wasn’t one to give up, so I flew in front of her face, and she was curious about me. But I could tell her eyes were not like they used to be.”
“What kind of eyes does a wind spirit have?” Toru was curious to know.
“They’re like a stormy sky sometimes, sometimes golden like summer, but other times, they can be blue like a cloudless day,” the old witch explained. “No matter their color, they were always so full of life, and now they weren’t. They were dull, and everything about her was fading.”
“That must have been terrible,” Varg murmured. “What did you do?”
“I wanted to learn about everything that had happened while I was asleep. But I had no means to ask, and Shearah seemed blind to whatever I was trying to convey through my flapping of wings and annoying buzzing sounds. So, I followed her into the body of the old oak, in search of answers. And there, I saw the most astonishing thing.”
“What astonishing thing?” Toru asked right away.
“The inside of the old oak was covered in Vranne saplings,” Shearah said. “They were many, crawling everywhere. At first, I didn’t know what they were, and I got scared, so I flew out of the trunk, desperate for shelter. But then, curiosity got the better of me, and I went back. And I saw Shearah taking each of them and blowing over it, to give it life.”
Toru looked around, confused. “Did she turn The Quiet Woods into a forest of Vrannes? Because that’s not at all what they look like.”
“Not exactly. Imagine my surprise when I saw that the saplings were turning, one by one, into new trees and plants and creatures of all kinds. She was making all of it from those saplings she had shunned in the past with so much vigor and disdain.”
“That might explain a thing or two,” Varg confirmed what Toru was also thinking.
“So that’s how the shapeshifters became trees?”
“That must have been it,” the old witch offered. “During all these long years I’ve tried to find an explanation for it, I didn’t find any other answer. The thing is, this new forest Shearah was creating was also bound to fail. At first, I didn’t understand what was happening. I woke up the next day and I was so happy to see that the forest was back, even though it was not the same as it had been when my body was just an old sack of bones. Only little by little, I began to see that nothing really changed from one day to the next, and that throughout the day, the forest was growing dimmer, losing the life it had been created for.”
“But we didn’t really see that happening. Except for, of course, the things that never change.”
“Shearah has gotten a bit better at it, with each passing day. So the illusion held, and I got nowhere near making her understand me.”
“But if the forest dies to be reborn every night,” Varg said slowly, “what will happen once the sun sets?” He stole a look around.
“As I told you, Shearah made it so that the forest didn’t really die anymore. It is just… dimming. As for the creatures, small or large, they just fall into a deep sleep.”
“How come you’re awake at night, then, troubling people who want to sleep?” Toru asked.
“I’m an old witch, Toru. So, I found a way to stay awake. I had to understand everything.”
***
“Which one do you believe is the most beautiful?” the voice questioned, and Duril took in the several bushes in front of him. One had tiny white flowers which had to be examined from up close for the person gazing upon them to understand their star-like shapes. A second had blue flowers, made of large voluptuous petals, hanging their heads low, under the heftiness of their fragile bodies. A third didn’t have any flowers, but seemed to have sprouted leaves in a myriad shades of green. It looked like a miniature miracle, and Duril delighted in it with unhidden wonder.
“They are all beautiful, and it is hard to make a choice,” he replied.
“Choose one, choose one, choose one,” the voice pleaded impatiently, like a child.
“All right. Since I’m so hard-pressed, I’d say that this one is the most beautiful,” Duril said, pointing at the third bush, the one without flowers.
A gust of wind rustled his clothes, and Duril witnessed in disbelief as the first two bushes lit and burned in just a few moments. “Did you… destroy them?” he asked, not yet sure if his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him, or if all of this was just a manipulation of his senses. “Why?”
“I don’t need them if they’re not beautiful enough,” the voice said hurriedly.
“But I thought you said something about not wanting to hurt them.”
“I didn’t hurt them,” the voice countered. Then it stopped for a mere moment. “They weren’t yet alive, but they will be. Only the most beautiful must remain.”
Duril wanted to argue against that view of things. “They are all your children,” he said, hoping that he didn’t sound too harsh or as an opponent to a spirit so mercurial in its dealings.
“Until they become, they’re not,” the voice argued in turn. “Let me show you more.”
“Will you destroy more of your creations while we play this game?” To him, it didn’t appear to be a game at all. He was trying to put pieces and pieces together, to understand the voice and why it did what it did.
“I’m telling you; they’re not yet alive,” the voice insisted.
“Do you play this game by yourself?” Duril questioned, without giving his permission to be shown more. He had a hunch that if he let himself be carried away by what was happening around him, he would never get to the bottom of the things that seemed to be truly important.
“I do. Every day. But it’s more fun when there’s someone else.”
“And how do you choose, which will live and which will die?”
There was listlessness in the voice as it spoke next. “I choose only the most beautiful.” Silence followed, and Duril was about to suggest that they should try to do something else, when he heard it speak again. “I don’t want to play anymore. You don’t like my games,” the voice was accusing and petulant, like a child that didn’t get their way.
Duril looked above. The sun’s journey through the day was way past its midpoint, which meant that there would be only several hours until evening set in. He wondered what his friends were doing. They were probably worried about him, especially Toru.
The voice sounded loud and clear, and close to his ear. “Why are you sad? Nobody is ever sad here.”
“I’m thinking about my friends.”
“But your friends don’t have beautiful trees and rivers like me,” the voice argued. “Don’t you like it here?”
“It is very beautiful here, indeed, but I love my friends.”
“I will give you something they cannot give you,” the voice said. “And then, you won’t want to go back.”
Duril knew that he had to choose his words carefully as he opened his mouth. “Do you spend your days only here? Don’t you ever go back to the forest, where your children live?”
“I’m too busy here, too busy,” the voice insisted. “A lightning bug comes…”
“The one that visits now and then? The one you don’t recognize as having made yourself?” Duril asked.
“Yes, and I know all is fine out there. If anything was happening to the trees, and the flowers, and the rivers, and the bees, I would know because then the bug would not come back.”
Now, he was curious about how that worked, and what it meant, but his attention was pulled away when he sensed something tickling the skin stretched on his stub of an arm. “What are you doing?” he croaked, as his strength poured out of him like water from a broken dam. He folded to the ground, incapable of holding himself upright on two feet.
“I’m making you beautiful,” the voice said.
Duril lay on the ground and eyed his stub with unease.
“Just wait here, I need to get something.”
It wasn’t like he could have moved, even if he wanted. He waited there, his eyes seeing nothing but blades of grass and tiny bugs crawling on them.
It wasn’t long until he sensed the wind moving across his body. And then, as he turned his head just enough so that he could see what was going on, a gasp left his lips. “What is going on?” he asked.
He could clearly see small saplings, dark like dirt, crawling on his stub. And they had tiny teeth and they bit into the flesh, strangely enough, without causing any pain. Next thing he knew, tiny branches began to sprout from the only part remaining of his missing limb.
“They’re good at this,” the voice explained. “To give life where I cannot.”
“Listen to me,” Duril said, “I don’t want to be turned into a tree.”
“But you’re not going to be,” the voice explained. “I’m only giving you the arm you said you don’t have.”
Duril wanted to argue more, but his eyelids grew heavy, and he couldn’t keep his eyes open.
***
“Then we must stay awake, too, and see the same things you have, old witch,” Toru said right away. Varg hooked one arm over his shoulders and looked at the young tiger who was always so ready to jump into the heat of the action. He loved nothing more than to tease him a little, but every word Toru said was true. The night before, he had roamed the forest side by side with Claw, so how come they hadn’t noticed the things Shearah was talking about? The dimming of The Quiet Woods, as the old witch called it, must have been too subtle for their eyes.
Or maybe, he thought, as he took in the council of trees around them, trees that weren’t trees, but people trapped inside bodies that didn’t belong to them, they needed to be at the right place, at the right time.
“What happens to them once the sun sets?” He gestured toward Claw’s friends, too silent to be able to offer him an answer themselves.
The old witch flew to his ear. “They return to their real selves, but only partially.” Her words were a whisper, a sign that she didn’t want the others to hear her. But that was a truth Claw was entitled to know.
He turned his head a smidge. “And shouldn’t everyone know about it?” he asked but kept his voice low.
“They don’t know, and it’s always painful,” Shearah whispered in his ear again. “They forget about it all the next day. For them, this is the life they’ve known ever since the wind spirit got mad at the Vranne saplings.”
***
Duril woke up startled, as if something had stirred him from his sleep. He moved with some difficulty, and tentatively stretched out his arm. A chilling sensation shot through him when he sensed something different about himself. He looked, and, indeed, something was different. The missing arm… was there.
And the sun was setting in the distance, casting its last rays over the miraculous garden created by his mysterious host. “Are you still here?” he asked in a raspy voice.
“I am. I was waiting for you to wake up. Now hurry, we must reach the old oak so that we can sleep.”
For now, there was nothing else he could do but to go along with what the voice wanted from him. More answers were needed. He moved his new arm cautiously, expecting it to fall or disappear like mist. It had to be nothing else but a mirage, one destined to fool him, and he didn’t want to think that the one behind the voice inviting him here could be capable of such cruelty.
Without a doubt, it wanted him to be happy, but that without asking him for a moment if that was what happiness meant to him. “I didn’t want you to give me an arm,” he said as he hurried on the way back to the old oak.
The voice urging him to follow was filled with a sense of urgency, and he somehow believed that it wouldn’t be a good thing at all if nightfall caught them there, out in the open. He couldn’t fathom why that would be so, since the night before, together with his friends, he had slept under the naked sky.
Maybe the entity wanted him to learn something of its nature, after all. Maybe it was it not wanting to be caught outside the safety of the old trunk once the sun set. And some of the answers he was seeking had to become apparent soon.
He cast one last glance over his shoulder at the unique greenhouse created by his host, the garden that held all those incredible plants, bushes, trees, and whatnot. The leaves were turned toward the ground, and it could be a trick of the fading light, but they appeared to change their colors to something as dark as tar.
“In here, in here,” the voice called for him impatiently.
He snuck inside and felt the trunk closing behind him as soon as he managed to get in. The dark was impenetrable, and he couldn’t see a thing. “What is going on? Why did we have to hurry?” he asked.
“Hush, they’re going to hear us,” the voice shushed him.
“Who?” he whispered, hoping that his voice was low enough not to be berated again. Patience was a virtue, as he well knew it, but at the same time, he wanted to find out what was going on.
“The visitors.”
“The ones you foisted upon my arm?” Duril insisted.
“Aren’t you sleepy? We should go to sleep,” the voice anxiously suggested.
Duril knew that sleep was the last thing on his mind right now. “No, not yet. Tell me who the visitors are. Tell me how they managed to make my arm whole. Tell me,” he continued, hoping that if he pressed enough, the entity would finally offer him the answers.
“I don’t know,” the voice replied, but it was clear as day that it was lying. “I just know that they can. I’m sleepy now, too tired. Let’s talk again tomorrow.”
“Hey, you can’t just leave,” Duril insisted, but his words were met by silence.
That couldn’t be it. Toru must be worried that he wasn’t coming back, and Duril felt a bit unnerved. He moved his arm, the new one, still unused to it. What could it be? And he didn’t intend on getting used to it, either. He had made up his mind, and he wouldn’t change it. Something of how his mysterious host made it happen caused him to feel a deep sense of restlessness inside his soul. He believed it wasn’t right.
For lack of anything else to do, he crouched and felt around on the ground for the tiny creatures he now suspected to be the same saplings he had seen crawling on his arm earlier. He even suspected something about them; despite being nothing but miniatures of those dreadful trees they had fought in the war, he recognized them.
It could be that because of those frightful memories he had recoiled from having his arm made whole by them. He brushed his fingers through the detritus under his feet, hoping that he would catch at least one and see what he could do with it.
Tiny teeth didn’t hesitate to scratch his skin and he cupped his hand sneakily around one. He stood abruptly and brought it close to his face, in an effort to see through the dark surrounding him.
“You won’t get any answers from them. They’re too young.”
Surprised by the sound of that voice, Duril dropped the sapling. By how he could hear it scurry away, he could tell it had to be frightened by being picked up like that. “Who are you?” he asked, although he had an inkling of the answer, despite his initial surprise. It wasn’t the young voice from before, but one old and wise.
“You know already, healer,” the voice said. “But I’ll tell you anyway. I’m Amarant, the old oak, the name everyone around here knows me by.”
“The old oak?” Duril asked.
“Indeed. And I’ve been a protector of Shearah, the wind spirit you’ve talked to all day, for many centuries.”
“Then you must know about these tiny Vrannes, don’t you?” Duril decided to ask directly.
“Yes, I do. They’re the other half,” the oak said enigmatically.
“What do you mean?” Duril asked.
“It takes two halves to make a whole, healer,” the answer came. “And you have met them both.”
***
Toru didn’t want to think about what would befall these newfound friends once the sun set for the night. Varg’s face had tensed as the old witch whispered something in his ear, so it couldn’t be anything good. He carefully eyed the trees that were probably waiting just like them for the dusk to settle.
It happened before his very eyes. At first, the trees stretched, like their branches had just begun to grow all of a sudden, and they became taller for a while, casting long shadows on the ground before them.
But, as Toru took in their transformation, as much in awe as his companions, he realized that they weren’t growing any new branches, nor they were just becoming bigger.
They were turning into what had to be their real selves, because they were not trees anymore. A tall, hirsute man, rounder around his girth than anyone Toru had ever seen, rushed toward Claw and toppled him.
“Beast!” the bearshifter exclaimed, while struggling to turn the tables on his so-called attacker.
Toru smiled. So now he would get to meet Claw’s friends for real. Why had he worried so much? Maybe talking to old witches for too long did that to people.
TBC
Comments
Laura S. Fox
... and you would be right about that, Margaret!
MM
❤️❤️I sense you are weaving a profound lesson for us all about excepting the good and bad. ❤️❤️
