The Language Of The Trees/ An Evalyce Novel [#NaNoWriMo16]

Chapter 1: The Hermit of Talboa

Talboa Forest, Northern Argoth, 10000 ft above the Aeryth Ocean, Year of the Minaret's Horn, 1722 CE

It was frigid day in my sixteenth year when I met the man who would irrevocably change my life. Gunmetal clouds scudded through the sky, driven by the fierce winds that chilled me to the bone. As I entered the forest, the trees around me soughed and creaked. Talboa Forest wasn't like Minzo. In Minzo, the trees were mostly oak, spread far apart. Talboa was a forest of regal pine and mastiff evergreens, grown close together. It was claustrophobic, but I'd had to get away and forests had always been a soothing sanctuary.

My glowlamp barely lit the path as I entered the deeper recesses of the forest, where the limbs almost completely blocked out the sky. Nevermind that I was lost in my brooding thoughts and scarcely paying attention to the path. Such that it was that I didn't even see the figure sitting propped against a tree. I had no inkling I was no longer alone until a distinctly masculine cough stirred me from my reverie. I gave an undignified yelp and my glowlamp went flying, to land with a soft thud on the matting of pine needles littering the forest floor. Heart hammering, I bent to retrieve my lamp, fighting valiantly to compose myself before turning to glare at the man by the tree.

He reached up and snapped his fingers, igniting a glowlantern hung on a broken branch above his head, illuminating a mane of curly black locks, shot through with grey, above a pair of piercing grey eyes that matched my glare. Everything about the man was grey, from his eyes to his rather shabby clothes to the leather toolkit unfurled in his lap, all of which should have told me then exactly what he was, but the significance was lost in the face of my indignation. He remained silent, continuing to hold my gaze, scowling all the while.

"By the Oak, what are you doing?" I demanded. "Waiting to frighten unwary travellers to death?"

He cocked an eyebrow and the scowl deepened before twisting upward in a slight smirk. His voice, when he spoke, was a low gravelly growl.

"Unwary travellers may find death in the forest if they are out tonight, but not from me. The coming storm is far more dangerous than I.

As for what I am doing, I am listening to the trees. At least, I was until I was almost trod upon. You must be new to Tribeca, to have so wandered off in the face of a winter storm. You're either very foolish, or very brave. Which that is- brave or foolish- remains to be seen."

Had the response been different, or even just less condescending, we might have parted ways and I would likely have frozen in the storm to come. However, those drawled out words struck a raw nerve. I had fled to the forest to escape my stepmother and stepsister, both of whom sought to make my every day as miserable as possible. I was new to Tribeca. After my father passed, taken in an untimely accident, my stepmother had drug her daughter and I out here, to the middle of nowhere. Cecile hated being here more than I, and enjoyed taking her frustrations out on me. I escaped into Talboa every chance I got, but never quite so deep within before.

His words were like a spark to dry leaves. My shoulders went back and my hands curled into fists. It was lost on me that I was alone in the woods with a strange man I knew nothing about. He could have been a madman, or a dangerous fugitive for all I knew. I didn't care. I was furious.

"Who are you, sir, to be lecturing me on wandering in the forest before a storm when you yourself are out here dozing at the foot of a tree?" I bit off, trying to hide the first stirrings of fear deep within. I hadn't known a storm was coming, and the village was several miles distant.

The man's scowl returned.

"I was not dozing, as you say. I was listening to the trees. Just then they were saying to me to watch out for the oblivious girl-child intent on running me down." He pointedly ignored my growing fury, and busied himself with returning a variety of chisels, knives, tiny hammers, and pencils to the leather toolkit. Rolling the kit up, he tucked it into a grey rucksack beside him. A small sketchpad and a half-carved block of wood followed.