The Ligneous Whisperer

The Ligneous Whisperer

What it is

It was once alive, and it offended the forest. No one recalls how any longer: a sacred place profaned, a tree insulted, one axe-stroke too many. The dryad, though, has not forgotten. She killed him, then bound his soul to the life of one of her trees. As long as the tree lives, the soul remains, and a tree lives very, very long. The body comes apart with the seasons: moss claims the skull, mushrooms sprout from it, roots run through the ribs. Everything dies, save the mind. It stays there, awake, watching the centuries cover it over, with not a single eyelid left to close. Most of these spirits sink, in the end, into madness; you hear them then, murmuring alone in the depths of the woods.
At the centre of the chest a flower grows, planted by the dryad: an asphodel, the one the spirits of the trees cherish above all others. It is the flower that holds the soul captive. It is the flower, too, that is the trap.

When you meet it

When you hear it: at first there are words, very low, carried on nothing. You look for who is speaking; there is no one. The murmur comes from the trunk, or from the ground, or from a little everywhere at once. In certain groves there are several of them, and the whole forest seems to be speaking to itself under its breath.When you find it: what you take for a corpse caught in the roots is not quite one. The moss, the mushrooms, the wood that has overrun it, nothing in there should move. And yet an eye, a single one, left intact at the back of its socket, turns slowly and settles on you. Then the voice you were searching for speaks to you.

Dangers

It does not fight. It has neither the means nor the will for it any longer. What it has is a voice, and a wish: to be delivered. It will beg you not to touch the flower, and perhaps, if it has kept its wits, to fell the tree. Heed it, however hard it is to believe a murmuring dead thing. For the temptation will be there: that flower glowing in a dead chest, the urge to end it, to tear the bloom out and set him free. That would be to kill him a second time. Cut, the asphodel frees nothing: it severs the bond to the tree only to rivet the soul to the earth, this time with no way out. The spirit no longer murmurs, it screams, and joins the unseen host of the forest's tormented souls. You will not have saved a wretch; you will have made one more enemy, forever. And the dryad who punished him will look very darkly on anyone who undoes her work.
There is but one true deliverance, and it is almost as cruel as the sentence: the death of the tree. To fell an old oak, sacred, watched over by a dryad, in the heart of her own forest. Few come back from it. That is the whole savour of the encounter: the easy gesture damns, and the right one may well condemn you.