Whispers in the Hollow Forest
The night air pressed in as our team crossed the boundary where light forgot to reach. A hollow forest, they called it—where trunks thinned into black silhouettes and the wind sounded like patient, listening ears. We carried the expedition’s only certainty: a map drawn by a man who’d vanished here years ago, and a stubborn stubbornness to prove the rumors wrong.
Our guide, Arin Hale, spoke in a voice that rose and sank with the rustle of leaves. “The woods remember you,” he warned, eyes tracing the silhouettes as if they might betray us. Lanterns snapped to life, casting halos that trembled along the bark as if startled by their own shadows. The path twisted, not with bends but with decisions the trees seemed to enforce—a corridor formed by living walls, each trunk a sentinel guarding secrets older than the weather.
“If you listen too closely, you’ll hear your own name spoken back at you,” Hale warned, half a smile, half a shadow.
We moved as a chorus of careful steps and whispered hypotheses. Our crew:
- Dr. Mira Chen, botanist, who believed the forest’s chemistry might explain the strange cold in the air.
- Jonah Reed, navigator without a compass that could survive the forest’s will.
- Lila Kline, photographer, chasing silhouettes that refused to stay still.
- Aiden Vale, the field linguist who insisted the forest spoke in grammar older than language.
Hours bled into minutes and then into something else entirely—the sensation of being watched by something soft and ancient. The whispers began as a murmur, a caress of sound that threaded between our footfalls. Then they sharpened, slicing through fabric and bone until every breath felt borrowed. “Turn back,” the whisper urged, not unkindly, as if a patient elder were coaxing a child away from a stove’s glow. But we pressed on, drawn by a rumor of a clearing where time would loosen its grip on memory.
In the heart of the woods, the ground opened into a circle of ash-gray trees, hollow and blackened at their centers. The whispering swelled into a crowded chorus, each voice claiming a different memory and offering it as payment for a glimpse beyond the veil. We approached the center, lanterns dimming as if the forest itself had blown out a candle, leaving us to listen with ears that felt too large for our heads.
What we found in that circle wasn’t a creature or a beast, but a stillness that remembered us. Our reflections mingled with the trees, faces becoming faces of old explorers who had never left. Hale stood among us, but when the wind rose again, he dissolved into a sigh of leaves and a single line whispered, then gone: this place takes what it loves and returns it altered. A chilling truth settled in our chests—we did not leave the hollow forest with stories, but with new selves that belonged to the woods.
When dawn finally bled into the canopy, only a few of us remained with our voices intact. The rest walked away with answers we could not bear to name, leaving behind a map that no longer pointed home, only to the whispers that linger beneath the branches, waiting for the next expedition to listen.