The Whispers of Secrets

Alas, it was just on the outskirts of a village called Eldoria, which lay in a distant mountain valley. Eldoria wasn’t connected to any of the big cities; in fact, its nearest neighbours were other lonely mountain settlements, nestled in valleys and surrounded by huge forests, cathedrallike mountains, and glacier-fed lakes. If anyone had turned to Propontica, marvelling at the extraordinary beauty of one of Eldoria’s views, it would have been impossible for them to imagine the once-remotely-imagined events that sent a single woman struggling to this little village. As the villagers of Eldoria had a saying, ‘One must travel far to reach truth and joy.’ But they were wrong. The secret of Eldoria lay not far from home. The secret? Certain features of the local environment made searching for items more difficult for those who entered the village, though not for the others already present. Exactly how did this work? Nobody quite understood. But it worked. People seemed to forget secrets right here in Eldoria. Over the centuries, while they were in the village, memories they would otherwise carry with them from home vanished. Why did Eldoria have this effect? How did they discover it? The stories have grown in obscurity, as do myths. This place was the secret they kept. This was Eldoria. And then, each evening, as the sun sank behind the mountains, there was a whispering as delicate as gauze, as whisperings are. It was a sound many of the village-dwellers thought was caused by the wind. Its rustle seemed to speak of stories we cannot hear and cannot tell. Now, these whispers were muted, nearly inaudible, and one had to listen very carefully to catch the fragmented phrases and translucent messages – but they could be understood, if only the will was there. For some, the whispers were spirits of the ancestors; for others, they were echoes of the people of old. One evening, as the first golden light of summer cooled on the edge of the village, Elara stood on the precipice overlooking the western river and the land beyond, and she watched as the sun folded itself beneath the horizon, and the curtain of night fell on the sky. Elara had more questions than any person ever had such questions, and they swirled in her mind as rivulets of ants run in tandem down the ribbed back of a leaf. Her grandmother, Althea, had told her sometimes stories of the Whispers of Secrets – how they were as old as anyone could remember Eldoria. "Grandmother, why do the whispers come only at dusk?" Elara had asked countless times. ‘Ah, Elara,’ she would say, her tongue curled around the word as she smiled and her green eyes crinkled behind the veil of her fringe. ‘Some things are better left unsaid, left to be found. You’ll discover why in time. But until then, Elara, you need only listen to what those sheep have to say if you truly wish to learn about our history.’ And she’d spent a lot of nights listening: roaming the village, hoping to hear them on the wind, slipping into the forest and even making her way across the sea wall but she never could pinpoint them completely. The whispers lived as much within her ears as in the air. She knew they were out there somewhere and, somehow, they knew everything about her and yet she was also sure that they didn’t truly know anything about her at all.