Whispers and Whisps

This story continues the tale of Ezok begun in “The Precipice.” You can read the original story here:

***

Many moons had passed since Ezok had found himself off balance.

All the seasons he had spent patrolling the approaches to the valley had never tried him the way these trees had. The valley, where no birds ever chirped or squirrels ever scampered despite the abundance of trees. The birds and squirrels knew better than to tread that shadowed ground.

Ironically, it was Ezok’s kind, with their reputation as the wisest of forest creatures, that could not resist its pull. The enemy that lurked within had learned their speech and ways. Bucks beaten in the mating rituals heard a fetching doe calling on the wind. Abandoned fawns heard their mother summoning them.

Sometimes, Ezok would block their path before they could fall into the trap that awaited. When that failed, he was the one who would do what was necessary. There was no salvation for the Taken, no cure for the corruption that now lurked within. The only course was to destroy the vessel.

In that way, the enemy had come to know him. It knew its siren calls fell on his deaf ears. So, it had taken a different tact.

He could still smell the waterlogged vines constricting around Lorren’s neck, hear her gurgling pleas for him to save her. And he could feel all his training, all his inhibitions and instinct falling away at the sight of those green eyes, despite the black splotches that now swirled within the irises.

Jessop’s voice had screamed in his ear, berating him for his weakness and blindness to so obvious a trap.

But Ezok wasn’t blind. He knew what it intended to do, and he did not care.

If it would let Lorren go in exchange for removing its greatest foe, he would pay that price. Even now, he would have let himself fall if it meant she might survive.

But the enemy did not bargain. It would not relinquish a vessel already in its oozing grasp. Two were better to hasten its spread. Every deer that Lorren and Ezok sought out would become another parasite, infecting more and more.

It never would have let Lorren go. And should she somehow have broken free of it, it would have caught her in time. Just as its vines would have ensnared every other living creature.

And so, Ezok remembered the look in her eyes as he sent Lorren’s infected body over the cliff.

You were weak to let her in. It nearly destroyed you. It nearly destroyed everything.

The Old One had trained him mercilessly, so much so that even now, seasons after Jessop’s death, Ezok could never be sure where his own thoughts ended and Jessop’s ingrained teachings began.

Ezok nodded to the words, realizing that they might not be memory at all.

The trees that surrounded him seemed to magnify every memory, every emotion. Unlike the enemy in its shadowed valley, this forest thrived in the light. Its energy had radiated out, pure and constant as the essence of one who had existed so close to the earth for thousands of years should feel. Their roots, it was said, tapped into deeper forces. These sentinels offered food, shelter, and solace to most.

But the more Ezok had wandered, the more he realized that the offer of safe passage did not apply to him. The air had stilled, the sky seemed frozen, and his natural sense of direction had unraveled.

Underneath the disorientation, a malice thrummed through these trunks. His presence offended. They did not welcome him as they would another of his kind.

Instead, they seemed intent on breaking him.

Memories among these trunks took form, as if drawn from the depths of his memory.

So it was that Ezok heard Jessop’s words one moment—and saw him standing among the dead leaves the next.

Ezok took in his weathered face, worn like the rock at the very top of a mountain, with nothing to shelter it from every season. The younger buck knew this wasn’t real. He had been there the day the real Jessop drew his final breath. A final lesson from the Old One: the Taken didn’t exist simply to spread the disease. They would fight to survive.

Look at you, Jessop sneered, wandering lost and alone like an abandoned fawn. You think you’ve grown since that day. But you’re just the same, boy. Without me, you’re nothing.

A sensation grew in Ezok’s bones, vibrating up to his chest and throat. But he did not give breath to the anger billowing within.

Jessop had taken him in after his mother had vanished. In all the seasons since, Ezok remembered only a scent of heather, which he presumed his mother had enjoyed eating.

You’re nothing, Jessop’s ghost repeated.

“No,” Ezok replied, “I am what you made me into.”

Others of his kind were driven by their instincts, the pure desire to live, eat, and see the next generation of whitetails into the world. Ezok had been taught to see through all of these embedded cues and honed to a single purpose.

Mist gathered around them the longer he stood still, but Ezok could not turn his back to this buck, real or imagined. Jessop had demanded that respect, and inlaid training forced Ezok’s obedience. Even if that compliance meant Ezok was playing to the forest’s designs, he would let the specter have its say.

Or, perhaps, Ezok wanted this opportunity to air out old wounds.

I made you into the perfect foe. The one to fight the enemy when I could no longer, boy.

“And I did.”

Jessop’s figure turned from dark ochre to gray, and then it was gone. But his voice remained. Then what are you doing here?

For a moment, Ezok could not recall. He had entered this forest because, even at the fringes, he could sense the darker workings within.

Moreover, it had wanted him to enter. Ezok needed to know why.

“The enemy is defeated,” Ezok spoke to the space where Jessop had stood. “I killed it.”

This time, Jessop’s voice came as barely a whisper on the breeze. The enemy is never dead.

And there it was, the reason that had carried him to this place.

It had all started that gray dawn so many moons ago, as he stared down at Lorren’s broken body at the base of the cliff. So many of his kind laid at his feet, and yet, this one revealed cracks in his core that he had never known existed. Torn out a heart he had never felt beating.

He hadn’t known her for long, but he had tasted her spirit. Warm, free, loving: feelings all alien to this sentinel. It awoke things in him. Produced sensations he had never known.

And that flicker of a life free of pain and duty…

…had nearly destroyed him.

If he had fallen to the enemy’s decaying tendrils, who could say just how far it would have spread. Perhaps the whole forest, and the forests beyond theirs, and the forests beyond that. Someday, the parasite would have the world for its host.

The enemy had failed in the grand scheme, forced back to its den with one less pawn. But it had succeeded in burning Ezok’s world to ashes.

There, on that clifftop wreathed in fog, Ezok had vowed to return the favor.

The enemy and its vines could not survive in sunlight. That sole fact had saved the world from being swallowed long before Jessop and Ezok had taken their guard posts. It turned to vessels, Lorren and countless others, to move where its corruption could not. While it continued to dwell in its shadowed hollow after each setback the sentinels had dealt it, hidden from its true enemy.

So it was that Ezok had scaled the mountain that formed one side of the valley and spoken to the goats who called its harsh slopes home. They knew of the enemy, of course. It was the reason they did not venture into the lowlands. On the rocky faces, they were safe.

At first, they had balked at Ezok’s request. Theirs was to exist in this world, not to shape it. But Ezok had argued that every hoof that displaced the dirt, every blade of grass they ate, every time they knocked a stone loose shaped the world. What he proposed only represented a larger scale. Like drizzle versus a downpour: both stemmed from the same source even if their impacts were different.

If they were not meant to shape the world, why did they exist?

That had convinced the mountain goats. And the next morning, as the first edges of dawn showed pink and furtive, the boulders rolled toward the valley. They ploughed through the pine branches, leaving gaping maws in their wake. As more thundered down the mountain, the trunks began to crack and splinter. Until the entire cursed ravine lay exposed to the dawn light.

Ezok had chosen dawn so that the enemy would have little time to prepare before its greatest foe made contact. And so that the sun could scour the valley from every possible angle before setting again.

Even so, he kept watch on the valley’s edge, waiting for the enemy to make some final, desperate attempt.

Instead, he bore witness to its final gasp as the great networks of vines sizzled and withered away.

For a moon, he waited to see if it would return.

After, he waited for the peace to settle over him, the final sigh when the battle had concluded and he could turn to the future.

Instead, he grew restless, for he had been raised for a singular purpose. What was there for him when the purpose had concluded? How could he live a life of lethargy and peace when he only knew duty and war.

So, Ezok had taken to wandering, convinced that the world faced more than one enemy. Perhaps they, like the raindrops, all stemmed from a common place.

And that hunt had led him to this forest.

Where Jessop had stood, he now saw a buck and doe, their eyes gentle and kind. In between them, he saw a fawn. But not just any fawn. He recognized the left eye stuck in a permanent squint. His left eye.

The scent of heather drifted on the air.

Ezok saw the soothing eyes shining at him from either parent. The fawn had vanished, but the doe beckoned to him. Telling him to take the fawn’s place. As their son.

The life, Ezok realized, he might have had.

Yes, a voice whispered, unlike any he had ever heard. It seemed to be coming from the limbs above his head. You can know them. Know what was never yours. You can know love.

Strange, unknown feelings ran through Ezok’s marrow, revealing aches he couldn’t decipher. After all, how could he grieve something he never understood?

For a moment, the offer hung in the air.

Then Lorren’s eyes flashed before Ezok’s own. A reminder of what happened when he hesitated in his path.

Jessop had been gruff, exacting. But somewhere beneath all the years of ingrained detachment, Ezok finally acknowledged a different sort of ache. The chasm that the Old One’s death had hollowed, when Ezok had been left to face the enemy alone. To find his way in the world with no one to guide him.

“I already have a father,” Ezok said to the specters of his parents. “And I knew his love.”

Then the kind eyes blinked, and before they could reopen, the forms faded into the mist. Now, a singular set looked back at him, cold and dissecting.

Love? The familiar voice rang out. Love is weakness, boy. Weakness is death.

“Yes, it is,” Ezok said, nodding. “That’s why you died for me that day.”

For a moment, the harsh light behind the amber eyes softened. Perhaps, boy. Perhaps.

Ezok assumed that was the closest he would ever come to anything resembling affection from the ice-veined buck.

But then, quieter, Jessop spoke for a final time. I am proud of you. Ezok.

Ezok blinked. Jessop had never used his name. In life—or in death.

Before he could fully absorb the strange sensations now swirling within him, the shroud around him evaporated.

You may go, the trees whispered.

“Why?”

Only silence for several heartbeats. Ezok had concluded that the forest would not reveal its secrets when the trees murmured again, You did not take what was promised. You are sure of your path now.

Despite every instinct telling him to leave before the great power that resided here withdrew its offer of safe passage, Ezok stood his ground. He needed to understand.

“What happens,” he began, “to those who take what is offered?”

More deliberation on the part of the trees, and then the mists farther from him parted. Ezok followed the newly blazed trail until he came upon a clearing. At the center, a great oak tree stood, its trunk thicker than any tree he had ever seen. Several still, black pools fed its massive roots.

But that wasn’t all it fed on. Surrounding the tree were tiny mounds of earth the roots had crawled over.

No, Ezok realized with alarm. Not earth. Creatures.

Dozens, perhaps a hundred, circled the oak. The older ones had been completely subsumed by roots. The newer ones still maintained most of their features, gazing out toward the edge of the circle with dull eyes.

“So…” Ezok spoke after digesting the scene before him. “You trap them.”

No, the leaves whispered with as much agitation as he had heard so far, we honor what is agreed to.

“How? How could I have lived a different life if I stayed here? Like this?”

Not in body. But in mind.

After a while of watching the glazed eyes and shallow breaths of deer, otters, foxes, and countless others, Ezok thought he understood.

“Are they in pain?”

They feel only what they see in their dreams.

“What happens after? After the dream ends?”

Their spirit slips from their old body, and they become one with us.

Finally, Ezok nodded. “I understand.”

You have the mark of one who has destroyed. Will you do the same to us?

There was urgency behind those words. A mixture of agitation—and fear.

“No.” Ezok shook his head. “You give these creatures something. The enemy I fought before only took.”

Ezok took in the glazed eyes one more time. It was not the look of servitude he had first feared. It was peace.

“I will not disturb their slumber.”

He turned and strode back the way he had come.

Tread carefully, Ezok, the foliage whispered as he neared the edge of the forest. Not all great powers in this world are so benevolent as we.

Ezok nodded, turning toward the horizon. “That’s why I’m here.”