By The Whites of Their Eyes

Fern knew from the first day she arrived, that, in her woods, the trees had eyes; they whispered it so to her. Each tree in her forest was exactly like the next; paper-white, with the slightest hint of a grainy, slate-colored film, like the light of a pale lantern cast against rain-speckled concrete, and perfectly smooth, spare their jagged, unforgiving eyes. Aspens, she’d heard them called, in human tongue.

Fern hid in the looming shadows of their trunks, and only their trunks, as the leaves had fallen for the last time long ago and left only barren branches. She sat upon a low branch, whistling a song taught to her by a blue jay, in a different time. A murder of crows perched on the branches above her and stared down at her with eyes like dark distant stars, singing back a single, low note. They were the only winged folk who took nest in her woods.

Her eye slid to theirs in envy, as she only had one that worked; the other was milky-white like the bark of the trees, and blind. It hadn’t always been that way; it was a curse of sorts inflicted upon her by the aspens. Although the audience of crows was few, Fern could feel hundreds of eyes focusing on her, as was common. Fern didn’t mention it aloud, but her mind cried out to the trees that it was impolite to stare.

Somewhere off in the distance, Fern heard the sound of a wolf’s howl, a bitter cry at the moon, which had first started as one voice, and became many. A pack of wolves prowled the woods in the same way she did, creating trails in the thin layer of snow that always blanketed the ground; they kept visitors away, but they weren’t the real danger to fear in the woods, Fern knew. Large slivers of moonlight shone through the canopy of empty branches, and made cracks in the seemingly-everlasting twilight of each night. During the day, the sunlight bled through the overcast clouds that hung low over the trees, casting everything in a pale grey light that reminded Fern of a smooth, riverside stone.

Suddenly, Fern sensed a presence that disturbed her peaceful half-slumber under the cover of dusk. She smelled them long before they were visible to her sharp eye, which, although lone in its watch, could see in night’s cover as well as it could by day.

Humans…. Fern thought, as their fleshy, multi-layered stench lingered in her nose. Thinking of the word lit a pang of regret ablaze in her chest, but it was quickly drowned out by something ravenous clawing at her stomach.

“Whitewood! Whitewood!” She could hear it whispering into her ear like a creature of the night, before it fell silent once more, as soon as she flicked her head to look below her, all of her senses sharpening and instantly sending her back into the present.

Looking up, she gave the crows an eldritch smile that lacked many teeth, which was expected from someone of her young age, and struck a feeling of unease in even the night-colored birds. Fern made her way swiftly to the forest floor with a well-aimed leap, causing her curly, wild brown hair to fall across her face in long waves. Brushing her hair out of her face, she stood for a moment, looking off into the darkness surrounding her, that crept behind trees and slid past the slits of moonlight. As she tasted the scent bristling through the air again, an odd hunger took root in her stomach, and Fern understood that it wasn’t her own.

Her feet found their way quickly across the gnarled vines and twisted roots that littered the forest floor, whilst guiding her gracefully through the trees. Although she went on two feet, her sense twitched and strained in the way that only an animal’s could; she displayed an odd mix between human and beast. Fern stopped at the edge of the clearing, where there were four people dressed in warm clothes, teasing each other and laughing boisterously in raised voices like a merry council of elves as they trotted upon a game path that had been downtrodden by wolves, and other creatures of the forest they had yet to meet. Watching their faces, clearly those of young adults, and the shadows stretched out across them, Fern snaked between the trees at the edge of the clearing with her body pressed close to their bark, like her namesake.

“Whitewood! Whitewood! Whitewood!” The thing took up its chant again, except it hissed the words with a fiercer volume than before, and willed her body to move without her commanding it so. The teenagers poked and shoved each other in the ribs, clearly having trespassed into her territory on a dare, and a sudden flood of hatred overtook her. For a moment, she hesitated, in an attempt to keep a hold on her humanity, which she knew the forest was stripping her of, but the power of the woods met the threshold of her own power quickly.

Her hands hovering at the sides of her head, Fern allowed the whitewood to overtake her. At that moment, her blind eye began to twitch and move in its socket. The woods came alive. The trees pulsed, their eyes, which had changed from slits in the wood into something piercing and catlike, darted in every direction, before resting on the people disturbing their forest. As her blind eye glared sharply, yet sightlessly at the intruders, they became quiet and looked around cautiously, a sudden chill coming over them.

The pale-white bark of the aspens peeled itself off, revealing the darker colored underwood, which was unveiled to the world for just a moment, before it began stripping away too, this time in a fluid fashion, in the same way wax melts off a candle. Saplings began to appear in a circle around all the people, and she could feel the creature hidden within both her chest and the trees weaving something powerful around them; a cold feeling in her stomach gave Fern the realization that she was nothing more than a device to expel it. The saplings that were closer in began to wind themselves around the feet of the teenagers, slinking up their wriggling legs, and grasping tightly onto them, whilst the ones that were farther out shot up into small, crooked trees that craned over the intruder’s heads. Disappearing from her line of sight, the people were trapped behind the line of small, thin trees that looked as if they were the white, brittle fingers on the hand of a skeleton hidden beneath the dirt. The woods that controlled Fern had become part of a forgotten creature, one as big as a mountain and just as old, and it was hungry.

The cage of trees began to pull them down into the ground, which had opened up into a seemingly endless pit to receive them, the teenagers within them, as she watched. As they disappeared underneath the earth, and their screams muffled into nothing, the woods settled back to the way they were before almost immediately. Fern let out a deep breath, when the creature finally released its grasp on her mind, and her unseeing eye. The crows, who had been watching from another spot in the trees, began to sing the low note again, willing her to continue her song from earlier. Although the sound of her whistling was clear and sharp once more, she couldn’t help but hear the aspens whispering to her.

Whitewood… Whitewood…