Growing up in the city, I always felt bad for the trees. Forced to live and grow in tiny dirt plots carved out of the sidewalk for decoration. Even the ones in parks, that are given a bit more room to grow, still have to contend with the poisoned air and artificial environment. It wasn’t until I was invited on a hiking trip with some friends that I realized I could understand the trees. Turns out, city trees aren’t all that talkative.

When we first started on the trail, I marveled at the beauty of the forest. The way every tree was networked with each other, creating a frame for the rest of the forests inhabitants to live in. I didn’t realize I was the only one who could hear them until Janette made a comment about how calm and quiet the forest was. Everyone looked at me weird when I mentioned how loud the trees were being.

These days, I do my best to play it off. I moved to the outskirts of the city. It took me a long time to admit that it was outside my ability to help or save the city trees, and being around them was unpleasant now that I know what I was hearing was them softly crying to themselves as they lived in death. The place I moved to has a very large and very old oak tree. I spend most of my time under her branches.

Without ears, trees don’t understand human speech. It took a while to develop a system for me to communicate back to the trees. In time, the great oak taught me the old ways of communing with trees: dance. They can feel as you move around them, so moving in specific patterns is the best way to be understood. Despite most humans having forgotten the language, trees still pass down the knowledge of understanding between them in hopes a human will once again learn.

Turns out, trees have been the keepers of lost human knowledge for a very long time. It was relatively recent when man forgot how to commune with trees. Talents like mine, those who could hear the tread in return, are fairly rare. But we have been entrusting the trees with our knowledge since the dawn of time. As time went on, I relied less and less on the civil world. I would spend my days dancing between the trees, catching them up on all that had happened since our voices went silent. And in return, they would teach me how to survive amongst them.

It was many years later before I first heard the name of The Dark one. It was from an old tree, old even by tree’s standards. Even now, as I write these words for someone else to learn from, I hesitate to write out it’s full name. It had been mankind’s first enemy back at the very beginning. The ritual to seal it away was what forged our alliance with the trees in the first place. An alliance that has weakened since man stopped talking to the trees.

I have spent the better part of the last two decades learning and perfecting the rituals and magics needed to keep the dark ones in place. I will do my best to explain them, but for the love of all that is good, find the next tree speaker. We must fix what we have let fall apart, lest we——

~~~~~~~~~~~~

The words stopped there; the rest of the old journal burned away and reduced to ash. Sam looked down at the old skeleton that had been clutching the book, its bones picked clean by the denizens of the forest. The trees loomed overhead, dark and forbidding. Expecting. Waiting.