The Stillness Beneath the Roots

The path was not marked.

Which was the first sign something had changed.

Lorien had walked the woods behind the mill since she was five, long before the gout claimed her uncle, or the sun stopped rising at the right hour. But today, the moss bent the wrong way beneath her boots. The wind hesitated when she passed. The bees ignored the bloom-heavy stalks.

And then, in a hollow where no hollow had ever been, she found the stairs.

They spiraled down. Carved from stone too smooth for tool or time. Her hand hovered over the top step.

It was the scent that made her descend. Not the mystery. Not the hush of birds gone quiet. But the smell: sweet rot and pine sap and a silence too ancient for naming.

She took the first step. Then another. And the air changed.

Down became sideways. Breath grew thick. Sound lost its anchor.

At the bottom, the trees opened into a clearing she had never seen. Not once, in all her wanderings. Not even in her dreams. But it felt like hers.

A ring of stones sat at the center, half-covered in golden vines. In the middle: a basin.

It was shallow, cut into the roots of a long-dead tree. Filled with clarity that didn’t belong to rain or sap. It shimmered faintly, as if lit from below.

She blinked. Touched the surface. It rippled outward. Once.

Then a voice said, "There you are."

Lorien spun.

A woman stood at the clearing's edge. Barefoot. Hair coiled with blackthorn berries. Skin freckled like the inside of a river shell. Her eyes were not silver, but the color of starlight remembered too late.

Lorien couldn't speak. Her mouth was dry as chalk.

The woman tilted her head. "You've carried grief so long it's settled into your skin. That's why you heard it."

"Heard what?"

"The stillness. When the forest holds its breath. Some people pass through it. Some answer."

"I thought this was a dream."

"Dreams don't ache like that." The woman knelt beside the basin. "Come. Sit. You'll need to decide."

"Decide what?"

"What to carry, and what to lay down."

Lorien sat. The moss accepted her. There was a pebble under her thigh. She didn't move it.

The basin shimmered. Not with light, but recollection.

She saw her uncle, singing nonsense over his soup. Her brother, silent and smiling as he carved animals into fenceposts. Her own hands, burned trying to save a nest that had fallen too close to the hearth.

And beneath those memories, something more uncertain.

A forest like this one, but quiet in a different way. The hush there was thicker, expectant. In it stood a door. Bark-bound, vine-framed. No handle. Just a shape waiting to be pressed. And someone, not quite her, standing behind it.

She sat still for a long time after the visions faded, as if her breath might bring them back or scatter what little truth they left behind. Her fingers were cold. Not from fear, but from holding too tightly to what could not stay. The basin had stilled again, but inside her, something rippled.

Then, a new image.

Her brother again, running barefoot through the orchard. But this time the sky above him was layered, split like pages in a book. In one sky, he was laughing. In another, ash fell. In a third, he vanished. Each version shimmered, collapsed, replaced the next. Lorien blinked, and they bled into one another. As if the remembrance itself was choosing which to keep.

"What is this?"

"A way to see what still clings to you," the woman said.

Lorien didn't answer.

The woman pulled a seed from the rootbed. No bigger than Lorien's fingernail. It glowed with faint, pulsing veins.

"You can plant this," the woman said. "It will grow something long-buried. Or you can eat it, and release a memory you've carried like a stone in your chest."

"That's not a real choice."

"It is. Just not a simple one."

"If I plant it?"

"Something returns."

"And if I eat it?"

The woman's gaze turned soft. Almost kind. "Then the weight quiets."

Lorien's throat clenched. Because she knew, without asking, which ache the woman meant.

It had lived under her ribs since the fire. Since the moment she saw her brother swallowed by the burning rafters. Since no scream had saved him.

She didn't want to forget him. But she wanted the pain to stop.

She imagined what it might mean, to live a life without the constant pull of memory, without the tightness in her throat every time she passed the orchard or heard a voice pitched like his. What would she be, without that hurt to anchor her? Grief had become the rhythm beneath her skin, the lens through which all warmth filtered. Could she even recognize herself, if she let it go? Or would she vanish alongside it, replaced by someone lighter, but less true?

She held his memory like a live coal, burning, but hers. And yet she longed to stop the pain.

Time passed in silence. Not the silence of absence, but of roots holding breath beneath snow. She turned the seed over in her palm. Not deciding. Just listening. To her pulse. To the stillness. To the question the forest was waiting for her to answer.

She reached, not knowing whether she wanted comfort or undoing. The kernel pulsed in her palm, as if waiting to choose for her.

She didn't speak. She placed it on her tongue. It cracked. And the hollow in her chest didn't fill. It simply stopped asking to be.

Lorien gasped. She did not remember why she had cried last winter. Could not place the pain behind her eyes. Her hands felt lighter. Her chest, unburdened. She laughed.

But she could no longer recall his voice. Only the rhythm of how he had once spoken, with the cadence of water over stone.

Smiling faintly, the woman held out her hand. "There. That's the first part."

"First part?"

The woman offered her a second pod. Darker. Shaped like a thorn.

"Now plant this one. Let something grow."

Lorien took it. Then paused.

"You won't be able to come back here," the woman added. "Not the same way. Not with the same eyes."

Lorien pressed it into the soft earth.

The ground shivered.

A vine rose. Fast. Like breath. Coiling upward into a shape.

At first, it was nothing. Then: a door. Wood twisted from root and branch. In its center: a mark. Her fingers brushed it. The door creaked inward, splitting the quiet.

Behind it, a forest waited. Her forest. But not. Brighter. Wilder. Trees pulsing with low, ancient rhythm. Leaves glinted like slivers of green glass. A scent clung to the air, lemon balm, crushed bone, rain on bark. A presence that waited without haste.

The woman was gone.

But Lorien felt something echo in her chest. A pulse like a root awakening. As if the second seed had not stayed in the soil at all, but had sprouted inside her.

She didn’t move right away. Just stood in the doorway, heart slow and wide, as if her body had grown too large for its grief. The wood beyond felt wild and unfinished. But also patient, as if her first step would tell it what to become.

Stillness filled her like breath held too long. She let it stretch, let it press against her ribs. Around her, the clearing pulsed, not loud, but certain. Every root and branch seemed to wait, not for her step, but for her consent. To be part of something again. To choose life, not as escape from grief, but as the soil it might grow from. She let her weight settle into the moment. Her hands didn’t tremble. Her name didn’t echo. The ache had ended, but something else had begun, and though she didn’t yet know its shape, she felt its truth in her spine.

The rhythm of the place caught her breath and steadied it. Each step she took hummed, soft, low, true. A music made for feet, not ears.

She stepped through.

Something stirred in the loam ahead. Not danger, but presence, old and listening.

The forest shifted, as if exhaling. A hum rose through the soles of her feet. It was not music. Not exactly. But it carried her brother's laugh. Her uncle's soup-song. The sound of a heartbeat before grief.

She didn't know where the path would lead. But for the first time, she did not fear forgetting.

Whatever grew here, it would remember her. And she, in turn, would remember how to begin.

And in the roots around her, the scent returned. Pine sap, sweet rot, and a stillness too ancient for naming.