The wind did not blow in this forest.
It watched.
Each tree bore a face — not carved, but grown. Flesh stretched over bark. Eyes that never blinked. Mouths stitched by roots. Elías stepped forward, and the ground whimpered beneath his weight.
"They're alive," Tirian whispered.
"No," Elías replied. "They're remembered."
He knelt by a trunk where the face of a child stared at him, mouth open in an endless, silent scream. Ivy had grown through its eyes.
A plaque below the roots read:
"He Lied to Protect a Lie."
The forest was not made of wood. It was made of stories.
Regrets fossilized into trees.
Tirian reached toward one — a woman's face twisted in grief. But as his fingers neared, her expression shifted. Her mouth stretched open. Her voice was not hers:
"Elías."
They both froze.
The voice came again, this time from the face of an old man nearby:
"Elías. You left us."
Another tree. A soldier's visage:
"You could've stopped it."
The forest was not just watching.
It was accusing.
"Elías…" Tirian said carefully. "Did you—?"
"No," Elías said. "But I will."
The pen in his hand glowed faintly. Not bright — but defiant.
They walked deeper, the light dying further with each step. The faces became more distorted. Less human. More… metaphor.
One tree had no face — only a mirror.
Elías looked into it.
He did not see himself.
He saw a throne made of broken words.
He sat on it, blind, with fire bleeding from his mouth.
The mirror cracked.
Tirian pulled him away. "Don't look too long."
But Elías already felt it — the forest wasn't testing them.
It was recording them.
Writing them.
A rustle broke the silence.
Not wind.
Movement.
Something crawled between the roots. Tall. Thin. Cloaked in moss and teeth. Its head was a blank slate, but around its neck hung dozens of tongues.
It did not walk.
It dragged itself forward, pulled by the weight of stories it hadn't told.
"A Witness," Tirian whispered. "I read about them. Beings that remember truths not meant to survive."
The Witness raised one hand — boneless, jointed wrong — and pointed at Elías.
"Write," it hissed, in a hundred voices.
"I won't," Elías said.
The forest shook.
The trees began to weep black sap.
The ground trembled with old accusations.
The Witness moved closer.
"Write… or become the next tree."
Elías raised the pen — not to write, but to defend. Ink spilled from its tip, forming a circle of burning language around them. Symbols clashed like teeth.
But the Witness stepped through the ink.
"Truth resists denial."
Tirian screamed, drawing his blade — a crescent of metal etched with runes.
He struck.
The blade passed through the Witness — and came out covered in names.
Hundreds.
Thousands.
All of them whispered at once.
Tirian staggered.
The names were his.
Every version of himself, spoken aloud.
He dropped the sword.
Elías caught him before he fell. "Stay with me."
"I can't…" Tirian's voice shook. "I just heard a version of me… eating his own mother."
"You're this one," Elías said firmly. "The one beside me. The one still standing."
The Witness opened its chest.
Inside: a library. Not of books. Of faces. Hanging, flickering, whispering.
Elías stepped forward.
And instead of writing…
He tore a page from his own hand.
The spiral of language branded on his palm — he ripped a strip from it.
The pain was cosmic.
He screamed.
But the moment the torn sentence left his skin, it became a blade.
A word-blade.
He plunged it into the Witness's chest.
The faces howled.
The trees screamed.
The forest broke.
The Witness shattered into fragments of story, dissolving into leaves.
And in the silence that followed, the ground shifted.
A path opened.
A staircase of ribs, leading downward.
Tirian staggered to his feet.
"Where does it go?"
Elías stared into the dark.
"To whatever truth they tried to bury here."
He looked at the trees once more — so many faces. So many lives reduced to chapters.
And he asked aloud:
"If a memory is cursed… does it still deserve to be remembered?"
---
Would you climb down?
Or would you let the past remain buried?