Chapter 3: Scene 1
The third morning dawned clear and cold. Elias left the cottage early, the sentinel pines dripping melted frost onto his shoulders. He carried a small kit: a stole, a vial of holy water, a leather-bound Bible, and the brittle wafer of his determination, hardened by prayer. Matthias was nowhere to be found, the cottage empty, the fire cold. A deliberate absence. Elias pushed the unease down, focusing on the map in his mind, the dotted villages along the river valley.
The first, Hintertann, was a cluster of a dozen timber-and-stone homes huddled around a millrace. The sound of the waterwheel was a grinding, perpetual groan. People emerged slowly, wary as deer. They were farmers, woodcutters, their hands thick with labor. They listened to his brief, smiling sermon on the porch of the largest home, their faces politely blank. They accepted his blessings for their children, a murmured “Father” on their lips, but their eyes slid past him to the tree line.
“Brother Matthias?” he asked a woman churning butter. “A older priest, thin. Have you seen him?”
She shook her head, not stopping her work. “Forest takes what it wants, Father. Sends back what it doesn’t.” It was the longest sentence anyone offered.
The pattern repeated in the next hamlet, and the next. Polite detachment. Averted gazes. The names of the villages blurred—Ochsenfeld, Steinbach, Erlau. He was offered small beer, coarse bread, a place by the fire. But no warmth. No confession. No eager souls yearning for grace. His words about salvation seemed to land like stones in deep water, creating the briefest ripple before sinking into an incomprehensible silence.
In the fourth village, a slightly larger settlement with a proper square and an old, crumbling wayside shrine now housing a weathered statue of the Virgin, he found a slightly more receptive audience. A few elderly women knelt, rosaries in hand. A man with a bad cough asked for a blessing. This was the place, he sensed, where the Church’s roots had been forced, shallow and tenuous, into the soil.
After administering the blessing, he made his way to the village well. A younger man was drawing water, his arms corded with muscle. Elias approached, adopting a casual tone.
“A beautiful valley,” Elias offered, leaning against the well’s stone coping.
The man glanced at him, nodding once. “It is.”
“Your people have been here a long time.”
“Forever.”
Elias smiled. “Not forever. But generations, certainly. It must have been quite a change, when the monastery was built up on the ridge. Brought new ways.”
The man’s easy posture stiffened almost imperceptibly. He hoisted the full bucket. “Changed some things. Not others.”
“I heard there was an old temple site up there before. I’d be interested in seeing such a historical place.”
The man set the bucket down with a solid thunk. Water sloshed over the rim. His eyes, a flat grey, met Elias’s. “Nothing to see. Just foundation stones. They used them for the monastery walls.” He paused, wiping his hands on his trousers. “Some of the old folk, they’re still sore about that. Wasn’t twenty years ago. They remember the fires when they cleared the grove.”
“Fires?”
“To cleanse the site, the brothers said.” The man’s voice held no inflection. “Lot of green wood. Made a strange smoke. Smelled like… crying, almost. Hung in the valley for a week.” He picked up the bucket again. “The priests who did that, they didn’t last long. Found the last one face-down in the millrace. Peaceful, they said.” He gave Elias a long, assessing look. “You seem a quieter sort. Might do better if you stay quiet.”
He walked away, leaving Elias by the well.
The words were a cold spike in his gut. Face-down in the millrace. Another predecessor. Not vanished, not converted. Killed. The official reports had mentioned accidental death, a tragic fall. A lie, or a sanitization. The man’s warning wasn’t about theology. It was about survival.
Shaken, Elias made his way to the square where he’d left his kit. The few faithful had dispersed. As he packed his Bible, a girl of maybe twelve approached, clutching a basket of kindling. She had wide, curious eyes.
“Father?” she asked.
“Yes, child?”
“Are you the new one for the Stone House?”
“The Stone…? The monastery? Yes, I suppose I am.”
She shifted her weight. “My grandmam says you shouldn’t go up there at night. She says the gods in the stones get loud when the moon is on them.”
Elias crouched to her level, forcing a gentle expression. “There are no gods in the stones, sweetheart. There is only God, who loves you.”
The girl blinked, unpersuaded. “Grandmam says the old gods got pushed down, not pushed out. They’re in the roots now. They listen through the trees.” She leaned forward, a whisper of conspiracy in her voice. “She says they’re angry about the fires. She says they send their priest to talk for them.”
The air left Elias’s lungs. Their priest. “Kaelen?”
The girl’s eyes widened at the name, as if he’d spoken a forbidden word. She took a step back. “I shouldn’t have said. I have to go.” She turned and darted away, her small boots scraping on the cobbles.
Elias stood, his heart thudding. So it was common knowledge. Not a secret, not a myth. The people here lived with a dual reality: the Virgin in the shrine, and the gods in the roots. And they feared the latter’s advocate more than they respected his own.
He decided to cut his circuit short, heading back toward Matthias’s cottage as the afternoon light began to slant. His path took him through a stand of ancient, twisted oaks at the valley’s head. It was here, in the deep hush, that he saw her.
A woman stood beside one massive trunk, her hand resting on the bark as if feeling for a pulse. She was older, her hair a long grey braid, her clothes simple wool but embroidered at the edges with intricate, threadbare patterns of spirals and knots. She watched him approach, her gaze clear and unafraid.
“Father,” she said, not as a title, but a label.
“Good afternoon,” Elias replied, stopping a respectful distance away.
“You’ve been walking our valley. Asking questions. Offering… alternatives.” Her voice was dry, like leaves.
“I am here to serve.”
“Serve whom?” she asked. There was no malice in it, only a deep, weary curiosity. “The man in Rome? Or the people under these boughs?”
“They are not mutually exclusive.”
“Aren’t they?” She patted the oak. “This one was a sapling when the Legions came. It has seen many services. Many truths. They all pass. Only the tree remains.” She looked directly at him, and her eyes were the same moss-flecked green as the forest pool he’d seen in Kaelen’s gaze—a family resemblance of place, not blood. “Matthias came with your fire. He sought to burn away the shadows. But fire is a wild thing. It does not obey. It consumed him, and now he wanders the shadows, trying to piece together what he turned to ash.”
Elias took a step closer. “Where is he? I need to help him.”
“You cannot help a man flee from a truth he has already swallowed,” she said. “He is with the Ever-Living. Being shown the shape of his hunger.”
The phrase, the Ever-Living, hung in the air. It wasn’t a name; it was a title, a function. A chill traced Elias’s spine.
“And what does he want with me?”
For the first time, the old woman smiled, a network of lines spreading from her eyes. “Want? It is not about want. It is about recognition. The forest sees a sapling straining for a different sun. It wonders what fruit you will bear.” She pushed away from the tree. “A warning, service-priest. The stones of your house are not quiet. They remember the song that was sung over them before they were cut. At night, they hum. Listen. You might learn the tune.”
She turned and melted into the thicker grove, silent as a shifting shadow.
Elias stood alone in the oak circle. The air was still, heavy with the smell of damp rot and vitality. He looked up. The branches formed a cathedral vault, filtering the dying light into shards of gold. For a terrifying, exhilarating second, he felt it—a presence vast and mindful, its attention resting on him like physical pressure. Not hostile. Observant. Curious.
He hurried from the grove, his steps quick and loud, a frantic human rhythm against the immense, patient silence. He didn’t stop until he reached the cottage, the familiar sight of its slumped roof a relief.
He barred the door. He lit the candle. The routines of safety.
But that night, as he lay on his hard pallet trying to pray, he heard it. Faint, at the very edge of perception, vibration more than sound. A low, tectonic hum rising from the stone foundations of the cottage itself. It was a discordant note beneath the world, a memory in mineral.
He put his pillow over his head. It didn’t help. The hum was inside his skull now, a counterpart to the remembered heat on his cheek. He knew, with a certainty that dried his mouth, that the message flying to Rome was meaningless. They would send men, perhaps. They would retrieve a body, or an empty shell.
They could not retrieve him from this. This was between him, the stones, and the thing that listened through the roots.
The hum rose in pitch, almost melodic. He clenched his teeth until his jaw ached, trying not to hear the tune.
He clenched his teeth until his jaw ached, trying not to hear the tune.
Sleep was a distant country. He finally rose in the bruised light before dawn, his body a column of exhausted tension. The humming in the stones had faded with the first birdcall, but a residual vibration lingered in his molars. He needed air that didn’t taste of cottage dust and decay.
He unbarred the door and stepped into the grey mist.
The forest was a monochrome sketch, all dripping silence and blurred edges. He walked without a path, letting the cold damp seep through his linen to shock his skin awake. His mind replayed the old woman’s words. The shape of his hunger. He understood hunger. He knew its arid geometry in the soul, the hollow it carved beneath the breastbone.
He stopped at the edge of the clearing where he’d first seen Kaelen. The moss was a brighter green here, defiant against the grey. He stared at the spot where those long, scarred fingers had touched him. The memory was a brand.
“Do you come to wait for him?”
The voice was a dry rustle, paper-thin and shattered. It came from behind a fallen log choked with fungus.
Elias spun, his heart slamming against his ribs.
A man unfolded himself from the hollow beneath the log. He moved with a stiff, painful carefulness, as if his joints were made of glass. It was Matthias. He was barefoot, his feet caked with black earth. The rough hermit’s robe hung from a frame that seemed only loosely connected, a scarecrow’s geometry of bones. His shaved head was a map of scars and liver spots.
But his eyes. They were the worst part. They held a terrible, hyper-lucid awareness, like a man pinned forever beneath a spotlight.
“Brother Matthias,” Elias breathed, the words a cloud in the cold air.
“Don’t call me that.” Matthias shuffled forward, his gait a lurch. He peered at Elias, his head cocked. “Thorne. Elias Thorne. Yes. I got your note. The one you left on my table. Polite. Full of sanctioned concern.” A brittle smile cracked his lips. “They sent another one. Of course they did. They never learn.”
Elias fought to keep his voice steady. “They told me you were lost. I’m here to help you.”
Matthias barked a laugh, which turned into a wet, rasping cough. He doubled over, spitting something dark into the moss. “Help. You can’t even help yourself. I can smell it on you. The conflict. It’s like cheap wine on a beggar’s breath.” He straightened, wiping his mouth. “You’ve seen him already. Haven’t you?”
There was no point lying. The forest itself felt like a witness. “Yes.”
“And he touched you.”
Elias didn’t answer. The silence was confession enough.
Matthias nodded, a slow, tragic movement. “I felt it too. The first time. Like sunlight pouring into a place that’s been cold for a hundred years. It’s not temptation. It’s… recognition. Your soul recognizing a home it forgot it had.” His lucid eyes glistened. “That’s the trap. He doesn’t seduce you with sin. He offers you a truth your God has never uttered.”
“Blasphemy,” Elias whispered, but the word had no force.
“Is it?” Matthias took another step closer. Elias could smell him now—unwashed skin, leaf mould, and beneath it, a faint, sweet scent like decaying flowers. “You hear the stones humming. Don’t you? I did. For a year, I heard them. I prayed louder. I fasted until my vision spun. The hum just got clearer. It was a song, Thorne. A lament for the grove they burned.”
“You were here for the fires?” Elias asked, dreading the answer.
“I lit them.” Matthias said it plainly. “I held the torch. We sang hymns as the green wood screamed. I thought it was a purging. A holy bonfire.” He looked down at his own hands, flexing the gnarled fingers. “The smoke got in my lungs. In my dreams. It never left. It’s the first thing he showed me when he took me into the roots—the memory of those trees, not as wood, but as life. And I felt it. Their fear. It’s inside me now.”
Elias’s stomach turned. This was the fate he feared. Not conversion, but this—a splintered consciousness, haunted by the very life it had destroyed.
“Why did you come back? Why live out here?”
“Where else would I go?” Matthias gestured to the clearing. “Rome? To tell them their priest is now a vessel for the screams of trees? They’d lock me away or call me mad. This… this is the only place that makes sense. The pain is honest here. He lets me stay. He says I am a living testament. A bridge.” He let out a shuddering sigh. “I am a cautionary tale, Thorne. For you.”
“I won’t end up like you,” Elias said, the defiance sounding hollow even to him.
“You already are.” Matthias reached out a trembling hand, not to touch Elias, but to point at his chest. “The hunger is in you. It’s why they sent you. The fire in you calls to the fire in him. The others were just… devout. Empty vessels. Boring. You’re not empty. You’re full of a war. He’s been waiting for one like you.”
The mist was beginning to lift, shafts of weak sunlight piercing the canopy. Matthias squinted up at them, flinching as if they burned.
“He’s coming for you, you know. Not to conquer. To converse.” Matthias looked back at Elias, his expression shifting to something like pity. “My only advice? Don’t try to fight him with scripture. He knows it better than you. He was old when it was written. Fight him with your humanity. Your messy, flawed, fleeting heart. That’s the one thing he doesn’t fully understand.”
With that, Matthias turned and began to shuffle back toward the fallen log.
“Wait! Where are you going?”
“Back under,” Matthias said, not turning. “The light hurts. The hum is softer in the dark.”
And he was gone, vanishing into the shadow and rot beneath the massive trunk, leaving Elias alone in the clearing as the sun broke through.
The hum started again. Not from the stones this time.
It was in his own blood, a low, resonant answer to the memory of a touch. He looked at his hands, imagining them holding a torch, and for a horrifying second, he felt the heat of the phantom flame and the scream of the sap inside the wood.
He ran.
He ran back toward the cottage, his breath tearing at his throat, but he knew nowhere was far enough. Matthias’s words were now inside him, grafting onto his own fear. A living testament. A bridge. He skidded to a halt at the cottage door, his hand on the rough wood.
He wouldn’t be a bridge. He couldn’t.
From the trees at the edge of the clearing, a shadow deeper than the rest detached itself. It didn’t advance. It simply stood, watching. Elias felt the gaze like a physical weight, an impossible warmth against the morning chill.
He saw the faintest gleam of moss-green eyes in the dark.
Then, a voice, not aloud, but placed directly into the fabric of his mind, quiet and inexorable as root growth: “Come and see.”
The hum in his blood surged into a single, compelling chord.