The whispering roots
784 Words
Chapter Seven: The Whispering Roots
Dharan staggered back from the stalk, the echo of the voice still ringing in his mind. It wasn’t just a hallucination. The words had weight—like a memory not his own, like a buried truth clawing its way to the surface.
He stared at the blackened Heartseed. It stood out like a scar among the lush green rows, throbbing with faint crimson light. The soil around it was cracked and dry—unnatural for land that had just seen days of rain. Something was draining it.
“Not yours alone…”
What did that mean?
He turned away, sweat trickling down his spine despite the chill in the morning air. It was time to consult someone beyond the village. Someone who might understand what this was.
---
By midday, Dharan was walking the winding road toward Elder Halra, the herbalist who lived near the edge of the valley in a crumbling stone house surrounded by wild plants and hanging charms. She was half-blind, nearly deaf, and rumored to have walked through death and back during the plague thirty years ago.
The villagers feared her. Dharan respected her.
When he arrived, she was already outside, feeding her goats.
“You’ve come late,” she croaked, without turning. “The soil's been talking for weeks.”
Dharan froze. “You’ve felt it too?”
Halra turned. One eye was milk-white. The other, dark and sharp.
“I feel what the earth remembers,” she said. “And it remembers the red moon.”
Dharan’s mouth went dry. “What is the Heartseed?”
Halra spat on the ground. “It’s a mistake. A gift and a curse. Your father planted it once, didn’t he?”
“Yes. Long ago. It failed. Or so I thought.”
“It didn’t fail,” she said. “It slept. Until now.”
She hobbled toward her hut and beckoned him to follow. Inside, the air was thick with incense and herbs. Scrolls, jars, bones, and strange totems lined the shelves. From a hidden drawer beneath her table, she pulled a folded cloth and unwrapped it.
Inside was a dried Heartseed stalk—blackened and broken.
“This is what grew when your father planted the seed,” she whispered. “Do you know what it bore?”
Dharan shook his head.
“Not wheat. Not food. It bore memory. Pain. Secrets. He told no one but me. And together, we burned it. Buried the ashes beyond the southern stone line.”
“But why?” Dharan asked. “Why would a seed do this?”
Halra’s eye narrowed. “Because the Heartseed doesn’t grow what you plant. It grows what you hide. What festers. What bleeds inside you. The land listens. The roots drink more than water.”
Dharan’s blood chilled.
“What did my father bury?”
Halra said nothing for a long moment. Then, in a rasp, she answered:
> “Regret.”
---
That night, Dharan sat in silence by the field, a lantern at his side and the old family ledger open across his knees. He reread his father's final entries—small notations, half-finished thoughts. And one, scrawled and crossed out multiple times:
> “I saw him again. The one from the field. He was tall, thin, made of shadow. He walked between the stalks and did not bend them.”
The same shape Dharan had glimpsed during the storm. The same presence that moved silently through the wheat, always watching, never speaking.
Except now, it had spoken.
And Dharan was beginning to understand:
The Heartseed had grown from more than earth.
It had grown from pain.
His father’s.
And maybe now… his own.
---
Far across the valley, beneath a red sunset sky, Aric sat in a polished boardroom in Drelmor, surrounded by investors and consultants. Charts were projected onto walls. Contracts were being passed around.
But Aric’s thoughts were elsewhere.
He hadn’t slept. The whisper in his dreams had become constant—faint, but persistent. Always the same phrase:
> “Return… return…”
He had chalked it up to guilt. Doubt. But today, something new had arrived.
On his desk that morning was a letter.
No sender.
No postage.
Inside, a single scrap of wheat—blackened, curled, and warm to the touch.
He hadn’t told anyone. He kept it in his pocket now, and he could swear it pulsed when he touched it.
He looked out the window, toward the distant hills beyond the city, and he whispered:
“I’m coming back.”
---
In Tolvan, the field glowed faintly in the moonlight.
And beneath the soil, the roots grew deeper.
Faster.
Hungrier.
- Writer
