Whispers of the Verdant

Once every hundred years, the Forest of Verdant murmured a name.

It wasn't just any forest. It breathed. It remembered. It spoke. Not in voices heard by ears, but in rustling leaves, shifting shadows, and dreams sent to the hearts of those attuned. It had existed since before the kingdoms rose, before humans forgot how to listen.

The forest had always chosen a guardian-a human soul who would live among the trees, care for the beasts, and speak for the forest in the world of men. This guardian would not age, nor hunger, nor fear while within the forest's bounds. But once chosen, they could never leave.

This century, it chose Kael.

Kael had never intended to find the forest. He was seventeen, a wanderer by nature and orphaned since birth. Raised in the crumbling streets of Greymount, he survived by wit and theft. The city had no use for soft hearts, and Kael had hardened accordingly. But there was one thing about him the alleys never could smother: his dreams.

Every night for a week, Kael dreamed of emerald canopies, rivers that hummed songs, and eyes that watched from tree trunks. On the eighth morning, with nothing but a satchel and a loaf of bread, he walked into the unknown.

The forest found him before he found it.

He crossed an unseen border-one step he was in sunlit meadow, the next, beneath towering trees whose bark gleamed like jade. The air turned thick with moss and meaning. The wind sighed his name.

Kael...

He staggered, heart drumming. “Who’s there?”

Leaves twisted into symbols, vines curled like script, and from the hush of nature, a voice formed—not male, not female, but ageless.

“You are the one.”

Kael’s mouth was dry. “The one what?”

“The Guardian. Chosen. Listened. Trusted.”

Something in Kael stirred-something buried beneath years of fending for himself. “I’m just... nobody. You’ve made a mistake.”

The trees creaked in amusement. “We do not err. You are Kael, son of none, raised by shadow. But you saw us in dreams. You heard our breath in the cracks of stone. You were always ours.”

He tried to run. His legs moved, the trees moved faster. No matter the direction, he remained at the heart of the forest.

The ground pulsed beneath him.

Suddenly, a figure stepped from the moss-an old woman cloaked in ivy. Her skin was bark; her eyes, the same green as leaves before the fall.

“I was guardian before you,” she said. “I was a girl from the riverside village of Nara. That was a hundred years ago.”

Kael blinked. “You’re still alive?”

She smiled softly. “Not in the way you think. My body still walks, but I am the forest now. Soon, you will be too. But for now, listen.”

And so she taught him.

Kael learned to read the language of petals and pollen. He learned to calm a stampede of shadowbeasts and coax healing sap from the bark of the elder tree. The forest accepted him slowly, the way an old cat accepts a new friend-watchfully, then fully.

He slept in hollows lined with fox fur, feasted on fruits that sang lullabies, and bathed in rivers that erased pain. Time passed differently-days folded into weeks, seasons into memory.

One dusk, the forest stirred in panic. The ground shuddered. The animals fled.

“They’ve come,” the old guardian whispered from the trees.

Who?

Men.

Not just any men-loggers, prospectors, men with saws that belched smoke and boots that crushed seedlings. They came to build roads and kingdoms, to bend the forest into lumber.

Kael stood at the border, where the sacred met the profane.

“Turn back!” he cried to them.

They laughed. “A wild boy in the woods? Move, or be moved.”

He raised his hands. The trees behind him responded, branches weaving into spears, roots rising like serpents. The wind howled his fury.

Still, they advanced.

The forest did not wish for blood. It whispered, Find another way.

Kael closed his eyes. And he listened.

At dawn, he returned-not alone, but flanked by animals. Stags with eyes of fire, foxes in lines of nine, birds whose feathers gleamed like metal.

But what he led was not an army. It was a promise.

He knelt before the men and offered a seed.

“This forest is older than your kingdoms,” he said. “But it will share, if you treat it as friend. Take only fallen trees. Plant two for everyone. In return, the forest will gift you herbs to heal, fruit to nourish, and rains to feed your crops.”

The men hesitated. One stepped forward, old and gray-eyed. He took the seed.

“Deal.”

And so, the forest and man did not go to war that day. They struck a pact. The first of many.

Years passed. Kael remained. He watched over the borderlands, whispered to saplings, and kept the dreams alive in children’s minds.

And one day, a girl wandered in. She was ten, curious, with leaves in her braids. She heard the trees murmur her name.

Kael smiled.

The century had turned.