There is a forest in the north where the trees remember everything.
The locals call it Istren Vale, though no one who lives south of its borders bothers to name it at all. To them, it’s just the forest that hums. They say if you stand inside its edge at dusk, when the last veins of light slip between the black trunks, you’ll hear the trees whispering in languages older than breath.
Most travelers don’t stay long enough to listen.
But Arin did.
I. The Ash Road
Arin had walked for six days along the Ash Road, his boots slick with the oil of crushed pine needles and rain. The road ran narrow between the cliffs on one side and the endless dark of Istren Vale on the other, and every night it felt like the forest inched closer.
He wasn’t supposed to be there. Nobody was—not since the fall of the city of Thallirion, the last outpost of the old kingdom. But maps meant nothing to Arin anymore. He’d come for what was buried beneath the trees.
The villagers back at Hollowmere had warned him about the Vale. “Things don’t die there,” one of them said, gripping his wrist with shaking hands. “They change.”
He hadn’t believed it then. Now he wasn’t so sure.
II. The Lights
By the time he reached the first clearing, the sky was bleeding orange and violet. He stopped, breath fogging, as the trees ahead began to glow faintly—like fireflies caught beneath their bark.
The Last Lights, the stories called them. Souls that refused to leave.
He stepped closer, his reflection swimming in the glow that pulsed from a massive beech tree, its trunk split by some ancient wound. In the crack, something shimmered—like water catching moonlight.
Arin pressed a gloved hand to the bark. It was warm.
Then he heard the whisper.
Not like a voice exactly—more like the forest exhaling. You’ve come back too soon, it said.
He jerked his hand away. “Who’s there?”
The air thickened. The light inside the beech flared, and for a moment he thought he saw a face—slender, sad, and utterly familiar.
His sister’s.
“Lira?” he whispered, the name breaking in his throat.
But the face faded, and the light dimmed back into the wood.
He stumbled backward, pulse hammering. She’d died here—three winters ago, during the rebellion that swallowed Thallirion whole. She had vanished into these trees chasing survivors. They’d never found her body.
Now he wasn’t sure they ever would.
III. The Witch of Vale’s End
He found her hut by accident.
It was half-swallowed by a mound of moss and vines, the door carved from a single rib of bone. Smoke coiled up through holes in the roof, carrying the scent of sage and iron.
When he knocked, the door creaked open on its own.
Inside, everything gleamed in the dim firelight: jars of bloodroot and amber eyes; runes scorched into the walls; a table scattered with feathers and teeth.
And at the far end, a woman stood hunched over a basin of liquid silver. Her hair was white as frost and long enough to drag on the floor.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she said without turning. Her voice was soft, like snow breaking on branches.
“I’m looking for someone,” Arin said.
“I know.”
He hesitated. “Then you know I won’t leave without her.”
The witch looked up. Her eyes weren’t eyes at all but shards of the same pale light pulsing in the forest.
“You don’t understand what the Vale keeps,” she said. “Or what it costs to take anything back.”
Arin drew a thin strip of cloth from his coat pocket—a child’s ribbon, torn and frayed at the edge. “She’s my sister,” he said quietly. “And I think she’s still here.”
The witch studied him, then turned to the basin. “Then look.”
The silver rippled. For a heartbeat, he saw Lira again—running through the forest, hair tangled, her hand pressed against her chest where light poured through her fingers like spilled stars.
“She’s alive,” he breathed.
The witch’s expression barely changed. “Alive isn’t the word I’d use.”
IV. The Heart of the Forest
The deeper Arin went, the stranger the world became.
The air shimmered with a faint hum, and the trees bent toward him, their branches threading together to close behind his path. The ground pulsed with faint green veins, as though the earth itself carried blood.
When he reached the heart of the Vale, he found a lake black as ink, mirror-smooth and ringed by white stones.
And standing at its edge was Lira.
She looked unchanged—except for her eyes, which burned with the same ghostly light as the trees.
“Arin,” she said, smiling, and her voice echoed in the water.
He ran to her, dropping to his knees. “You’re alive—Lira, I thought—”
She touched his face, and her hand was cold enough to ache. “I’m part of it now,” she said softly. “The forest doesn’t let go. It takes what’s lost and weaves it into itself.”
He stared, horror sinking in. “I can take you home. The witch said—”
“She lied,” Lira whispered. “There is no leaving, not without becoming something else.”
Behind her, the lake rippled. Pale shapes stirred beneath the surface—hundreds of them, like reflections trapped in water.
“They’re all here,” she said. “The fallen. The forgotten.”
The air shivered as the lights inside the trees flared, a thousand souls glowing at once.
Arin reached for her again, but his fingers passed through her skin like smoke. “Lira, please.”
Her expression softened, and she pressed her glowing hand against his chest. “Then stay,” she said.
V. The Last Light
When dawn came, the witch stood at the lake’s edge, her shadow long over the rippling water.
She looked down at two figures intertwined beneath the surface—one bright, one dim.
For a long moment, she said nothing. Then she raised her hands and whispered to the trees, and the forest sighed in answer.
Far above, the canopy lit up in a wave of gold. One new light flickered among the others, then settled, steady as a heartbeat.
Another memory added to the forest that never forgets.
Epilogue
By winter, travelers on the Ash Road swore the forest had grown louder.
They said if you stopped by the old lake and listened at dusk, you’d hear two voices in the hum—a man and a woman, speaking softly to each other, just beneath the sound of the wind.
And sometimes, when the light hit just right, you could see them standing together among the trees—two bright silhouettes holding hands, shining brighter than all the rest.
Author’s note:
The Forest of Last Lights is a story about memory and grief—about the things we chase when we can’t let go. It’s also about the price of trying to rewrite what nature (or fate) has already claimed.
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