It begins as a feeling — a tingling in the soles of your feet, as though the ground itself is vibrating with a frequency just below hearing. Then, if you are still, if you press your palm to the earth and close your eyes, you begin to hear them.
The roots speak.
Not in words, exactly. In impressions. In memories that are not yours but feel more real than your own. You smell rain that fell three thousand years ago. You feel sunlight from a season that ended before your grandparents' grandparents were born. You hear laughter — elven laughter, from the days when the forest stretched from horizon to horizon, and the world was young, and nothing had yet been broken.
Thalion Rootward has spent forty years listening to the roots, and he says each season reveals a different layer. In spring, the roots share joy — births and blossoms and the first warm rains. In summer, they share pride — great trees reaching their full height, canopies so thick that the world below existed in permanent, sacred shade. In autumn, they share grief — the falling of leaves, the first withdrawals, the slow realization that the forest was shrinking.
In winter, they share warnings.
"The winter voices are the oldest," Thalion told me, his silver eyes reflecting the pale light of the grove. "They come from before the elves, before the trees as we know them, from the first roots that ever gripped the earth. And they all say the same thing, in different ways, across ten thousand years of whispered memory."
He paused. The forest was silent around us, but beneath our feet, I felt the vibration — steady, patient, ancient.
"They say: Hold fast. Something is coming. Hold fast."