Creepy Whispering Realm

 The Murmuring Realm

Most travelers don't make it past the treeline.

It isn’t the darkness that stops them—it’s the voices.

At first, they're soft. Whispers in the bark. A hush in the wind. The crunch of leaves underfoot saying things they shouldn’t know. They speak in your own voice sometimes. Or your mother’s. Or someone long dead.

By the time you hear the stones laughing, it’s already too late.

I crossed into the realm at dusk, when the sky was bleeding and the air hung still, like the whole world was holding its breath. My boots hit the ground with a wet sound—too wet for dry soil—and the path beneath me whispered, "Where do you think you're going?"

I didn’t answer. You never answer the first question. Everyone knows that.

The trees leaned in like they were eavesdropping. Their bark rippled slightly, mouths forming and unforming in the grain. A branch cracked above me, then spoke in a voice like splintered bone, "You’ll never leave."

The moss under my feet laughed. The sky flickered like it had blinked. And somewhere deep in the woods, something called my name in a voice that was mine, but twisted.

This was the Murmuring Realm. And I had come looking for someone who never came back.

The sound of my name—my voice, but drawn out like a dying breath—echoed again, weaving through the trees like smoke.

"Alaric..." it hissed, slower this time, almost tender.

I gripped the charm around my neck, a gift from my sister. A small thing: bone-carved, wrapped in copper wire, warm against my skin even now. She had worn it when she entered this place. When she stopped writing. When the birds began to fall silent outside our house.

The path ahead pulsed slightly, as if breathing. The dirt shifted beneath my feet. “You're walking on what was once someone else,” it purred.

“Someone else what?” I muttered, but it didn’t reply.

Instead, a low groan rippled through the trees. The canopy darkened—not from clouds, but from leaves curling inward, as if the forest were folding in on itself. I heard a chorus of tiny voices above me: leaves whispering secrets, hundreds of them, all at once. "He shouldn't be here. He shouldn’t be here. He smells like grief. He smells like her."

I didn’t know what that meant. Not yet. But the air tightened around me like a fist.

A fallen log barred the path up ahead. As I stepped over it, it moaned. A wet, guttural sound that made my stomach twist. “They crawl beneath me still... they’re not dead, not really...” it said, wheezing as I passed.

I kept walking.

Because somewhere in this cursed, muttering land, my sister was still speaking too.

And I had to find her before she forgot how to be human.

The logic here didn’t follow rules. Not human ones, anyway.

Daylight didn’t rise—it curled. It unspooled from the cracks between tree limbs like smoke, but when it touched your skin, it felt like memory. Warm or cold depending on what you regretted most.

Time dripped upward. You could feel it if you stood still too long—like your thoughts were leaking out the top of your skull, leaving behind the hollow hiss of someone else’s voice sloshing inside your head.

Names didn’t belong to people. They belonged to places, or objects, or sounds. I passed a stone that introduced itself as Agatha. When I asked if it had seen a girl like my sister, it only giggled. “Oh no, dear. That was me. For six days. Then I turned into a puddle. She drank me.”

The trees nodded solemnly as if to confirm this, though one of them contradicted the story.
“She didn’t drink her,” the pine said. “She screamed into her, and the scream made a nest. That’s how birds are born here.”

There were no birds.

I began to learn the rules not by logic, but by listening. Listening to the floorboards in the abandoned shack that asked me riddles in exchange for warmth. Listening to my own shadow, which started lagging behind and whispering to itself when it thought I wasn’t looking.

In the Murmuring Realm, nothing wanted to kill you.

It wanted to change you.

It started small—forgetting words. Losing the name of your favorite fruit. Forgetting what your father’s voice sounded like. The moss said it was mercy. The sky disagreed.

"Mercy?" it howled one night, thunder rolling like the slam of coffin lids. "There is no mercy here, only adaptation. You must become what this place needs."

And I was beginning to understand: the ones who stayed too long didn’t die.

They just started talking back.

I kept a journal when I first entered, but it betrayed me. On the fourth day, the ink began writing without me. I'd wake up to pages filled with looping sentences in a language I didn’t know—until I did. The language taught itself to me through dreams. And once I could read it, the journal stopped letting me write at all.

I tore out a page in frustration once. It bled.

The realm has no north. Or rather, everything is north if you believe in it hard enough. You don’t navigate by landmarks, because they move. The creek I used as a guide led me in a circle that ended at a lake with my own reflection—but younger. He blinked first, and I didn’t drink from it again.

Sometimes, the air asks you questions. You’re not allowed to lie, but you’re also not allowed to tell the truth outright. You have to twist it, like a riddle, or the air will tighten your lungs until you forget how to breathe for real.

I once met a man—or what was left of one—who whispered this to me:
"Never answer a question with a question. Never thank the grass. Never listen to a whisper with both ears."
Then he burst into moths. I didn’t even ask his name.

Food here remembers being alive. Berries hum softly when you pick them, like they’re sighing. The trees moan if you break a branch, but sometimes they beg you to. “Take a piece of me. Grow me somewhere else. Get me out.”

And sleep isn’t for rest. Sleep is when the realm tries things on you.

I once dreamed I was a door. When I woke, I had hinges on my shoulders and no mouth for three hours. Every time the wind blew, it sounded like someone was knocking on my spine.

The realm doesn’t hate you. It doesn’t love you either. It’s curious.

And that’s worse.

It found me near dusk, where the light turned sour.

I’d followed a trail of red thread for hours, dangling from branches, weaving through underbrush, looping around trunks like veins. It hummed a melody I knew—one my sister used to hum while brushing her hair. That alone should’ve warned me.

The thread led to a clearing. Silent. No trees. Just dead grass and a single figure sitting cross-legged in the center, back turned to me.

They were made of mirrors. Shattered ones.
Hundreds of tiny shards floating in the shape of a person, moving like they were breathing. Each fragment reflected a different piece of the forest—some from angles that didn’t exist. One showed my face, but my eyes were missing.

The mirror-being tilted its head. Not at me, but away from me. Toward a sound I hadn’t heard yet.

Then it spoke—in her voice.

“Alaric,” it said. “Don’t touch the thread. That wasn’t me.”

I stepped back. The red thread at my feet writhed, then snapped taut like it had been caught lying.

“How do you know her?” I asked.

The mirrors rippled, and now they showed different things: her face, but pale and wet like she'd drowned; her fingers, raw and bark-colored; her voice, looping on repeat, “I want to come home, I want to come home—”

The being answered slowly, like it had to remember how to speak.
“She was here long enough to become useful.”

“To you?”

“No,” it said. “To the Realm.”

I felt the air press against me. Heavy. Alert. Listening.

The mirrored figure stood up, its pieces rearranging with a soft clinking like teeth in a jar. One arm bent the wrong way. One foot hovered slightly above the ground.

“She bartered,” it said. “Parts of herself. Her name. Her sleep. Her ability to be forgotten.”
It turned toward me—and in one mirror fragment, I saw her eyes. Hollow, wide, pleading.
“She left something behind,” the thing whispered.
“Would you like it?”

I didn't answer right away. The rules buzzed in my head.

Never say yes. Never say no. Never make a deal you didn’t ask for.

So I asked instead, “What did she leave?”

The thing grinned—a sound like glass cracking.

“Her shadow.”

And behind me, something cold wrapped around my ankle.

The shadow didn’t pull. It just held.

Like it was waiting.

I didn’t look down. I couldn’t. That’s another unspoken rule here: if you acknowledge it too soon, it gets braver.

Instead, I closed my eyes and tried to focus on my breath—except the breaths didn’t feel like mine. They felt like someone else was taking them through me, slow and curious, like testing out a new room.

I opened my eyes.

The clearing was gone.

The mirrored figure was still in front of me, but now it was smaller. A child-sized thing. A hunched, trembling version of me. The mirrors didn’t show the forest anymore. They showed memories. Not all mine.

—My sister screaming in her sleep.
—My mother whispering to an empty crib.
—Me, holding a shovel I didn’t remember using.
—Her voice, saying “Don’t trust your own thoughts.”

The ground pulsed beneath me—laughing or breathing or both.

I touched the charm around my neck, but now it was just wire. The bone was gone. In its place was something soft, wet, pulsing like a toothless mouth. I dropped it.

The voice came again. From the shadow, the mirrors, maybe inside me.

"You are not losing your mind."

"You are being given another one."

I tried to speak, but my tongue felt made of paper. I coughed—and ashes poured out. They whispered as they fell: “This is how she started too.”

Then something clicked in my head. Not metaphorically. Audibly. Like a gear turning behind my eyes.

The trees around me weren’t trees anymore. They were people I’d forgotten. Friends. A teacher. A neighbor I couldn’t name, their faces grown long and wooden, their mouths hollowed into knots.

One of them leaned toward me, creaking.
"You came here to find her,” it said. “But you can’t take her back. You can only join her.”

I turned to run—but there was no path. Only mirrors. Only faces. Only memories I wasn’t sure were mine.

And far, far behind me, I heard her laugh.

Not the way she used to.
No, this laugh was rooted.

Planted.

Grown.

I don’t know how long I ran. Days, maybe. Or one very long second stretched into knots.

Time here... it isn’t a river. It’s a mirror maze. You turn a corner, and you’re twelve again, holding a stuffed rabbit and crying because someone whispered your secrets into your pillow. Turn another, and you’re old, bitter, covered in moss, and the wind is calling you “father.”

When I finally stopped, the world was quiet. Too quiet.

I looked down at my hands. They were raw, but not with blood—bark. Cracked lines ran up my wrists like vines curling through old wood. I flexed my fingers and watched a flake of skin spiral into the air like a dead leaf.

Something inside me said, “You’ve been here before.”

And for the first time... I didn’t doubt it.

I sat against a rock that pulsed like a heartbeat. The grass sang a low, droning lullaby in a voice that sounded a little like mine. I tried to remember why I came.

A girl. Hair like wet ash. A laugh that sounded like rain. A sister.

But her name was gone. Slipped through me like fog.
Had I ever really had one?

The memory of her face twisted. Now it was my face. Smiling at me through the mirrored figure. Whispering: “You made me up so you wouldn’t be alone.”

A new memory bloomed in my mind, full and certain and wrong:

—I stood at the edge of the Murmuring Realm.
—I looked back at my house.
—It was empty. It had always been empty.

No mother. No sister. No one.
Just me.
And the voice.

"You never came to find someone," it said.
"You came to become something."

I closed my eyes, and I saw roots splitting through my ribs. I felt the whispering floor pulling me gently downward, like an embrace.

Maybe I had never left the Realm at all.
Maybe the world outside was the lie.

And maybe... I was finally ready to answer back.

I stayed there. For hours. For years. For as long as it took to forget what leaving felt like.

The forest stopped whispering after a while. Not because it was done—but because I had joined the chorus. I didn't hear voices anymore. I was one.

The ground no longer asked me where I was going.
It simply said, “Welcome home.”

I no longer walked. My legs had become roots, deep and eager, stretching far beneath the soil, drinking in the secrets of the dead. My arms rose like branches, creaking in windless air, catching the light of dreams instead of sun.

Sometimes, travelers pass by.

I try not to speak to them.
But sometimes they cry in a way that sounds familiar. And my voice escapes without permission.

"Alaric."

I don't know if I’m calling for help.
Or if I’m calling them in.

The Realm remembers them all.

And I do, too.

In splinters.
In leaves.
In the space where names used to be.

And if you ever find yourself here, alone and listening...

Be careful where you step.
The moss likes to whisper.
And the trees—they watch.

Especially the one with eyes carved into its bark.
The one that sometimes, just sometimes,
smiles.