The Ash Trees Whisper

The winter of 1919 never ended in Vensh Hollow.

They called it the Black Freeze. Snow fell in mid-April and stayed until June. The sun rose red, then vanished behind bruised clouds by noon. And the ash trees whispered at night—though no one liked to say so aloud.

Corporal Elias Dunn was stationed in the Hollow with three others. Their orders were vague: guard the old mine, maintain silence, no fires after dusk.

The days were gray and heavy. The nights worse.

Private Hobbs was first to change. He began scribbling in his journal with frantic, broken strokes. He muttered in his sleep. “They’re singing in the ash,” he’d say. “No mouths. No tongues. Still they sing.”

Then, one morning, he was gone. Left his boots by the fire and vanished into the white.

“Deserter,” Sergeant Mauldin spat.

But Elias saw the frost patterns where Hobbs had slept—spirals, not natural ones. Like script pressed into snow.

By the second week, Private Rowe refused to enter the forest to collect firewood. “Something’s wrong with the trees,” she whispered. “They move. Just a little. Just enough to watch.”

The next night, the whispering came.

It sounded like breath drawn through a reed flute. No words. Just pressure. Just presence.

Elias tried to stay awake. But sleep clawed at him.

He dreamed of ash boughs curling like fingers, of hollowed-out men hung from branches by their tongues. The song came then—high and sad and hungry.

When he woke, Sergeant Mauldin was staring into the snow, lips moving soundlessly. Blood ran from his ears.

Rowe screamed when she saw his eyes—entirely black, like charred marbles.

That night, she ran.

Elias was alone.

He tried to radio command. Static. Tried to follow the path down the mountain. The snow twisted it. He ended up back at the mine. Always the mine.

The ash trees grew denser there.

He lit a fire, even though it was forbidden.

That was when they came.

Not ghosts. Not beasts. They looked like men, but made of wind and soot and dead language. They stepped from between trees with a grace that hurt to witness.

One knelt beside Elias and opened a mouth filled with falling ash. It spoke in the voices of all who had disappeared.

“Come,” it whispered, “and listen.”

Elias felt his mind unravel like twine in water.


---

He awoke in a sanitarium in Marseille, eyes bandaged, fingers frostbitten. They told him he’d been found wandering alone, whispering to the trees.

The war was over. His unit never existed on paper. The mine, abandoned in 1892.

He rebuilt his life. Married. Had a daughter. Named her Ashlyn, though he never knew why.

Now, an old man, Elias lives in a quiet home on the edge of a forest. His daughter thinks the dementia is setting in.

But at night, he hears the ash trees again.

They whisper through the walls.

He dreams of frost and spirals and songs without tongues.

This morning, he found his boots by the fire.

And the snow hasn’t stopped falling.