The Whispering Wind

The wind began to blow before the sun rose. It picked up leaves and danced them across the asphalt with the sound of broken glass and chandelier jewels. Then it spoke her name.

“Lena…”

The whisper was soft, delicate, and wet, as if carried through a mouth that wasn’t quite human. Lena froze at her window, one hand on the cold glass, her reflection pale and hollow in the pre-dawn dim.

It wasn’t the first time she’d heard it. But it was the first time it had come from outside.

Lena lived at the edge of town, where the road ended, and the forest began, a dark mesh of pine and ash that swallowed the light even at noon. For weeks now, she’d dreamed of wind.

In the dreams, it moved like a creature through the trees, tugging at her hair, breathing against her neck, learning the shape of her name until it could pronounce it with perfect intimacy. Tonight, the dream had followed her into waking.

She pulled her robe tight and went to the porch. The wind gusted once, scattering the dying leaves into spirals that shimmered like scales before falling flat again.

The world seemed to hold its breath. “Lena…” It came again, from the trees.

The sound had direction. She could almost trace its origin, a hollow among the roots, like the earth itself exhaling.

Every instinct begged her to go back inside, to lock the door, to wait for the morning. But curiosity is a kind of gravity that pulls harder the more one resists.

She stepped down from the porch.

The wind curled around her ankles, warm despite the cold, coaxing. It pulled her toward the forest path she hadn’t walked since her mother’s disappearance three years ago.

The police had said she wandered off during a storm and never returned. But Lena had heard the wind that night, too, whispering something she hadn’t dared to understand.

She followed the voice now. The forest accepted her like a closing mouth.

The deeper she went, the louder it became. It wasn’t a single voice anymore but many, soft, murmuring, sighing, all speaking her name in fragments.

“Lena…enna…na…” They brushed her ears and the back of her neck, sometimes tender, sometimes hungry.

She reached the clearing where the old oak stood, enormous and black, its roots gnarled like clutching hands. Beneath it was the hollow, a pit lined with slick stones, half-filled with leaves and stagnant water.

The wind circled it, singing her name in a hundred different tones, as if inviting her to answer. She whispered back, “I’m here.”

The forest stilled.

Then, slowly, the wind changed direction. It didn’t come from above anymore. It rose from below. The surface of the water rippled, forming rings that spun inward, tighter and tighter, until something dark broke through.

At first, it was a wind, a swirling column of air and ash. But within it, forms began to take shape.

Faces. Dozens of them, shifting in and out of being, as if seen through fogged glass.

Some she recognized. Her mother, her grandfather, the woman who’d gone missing from the next town last winter.

Their mouths moved, but their eyes were empty, black with movement, as if something lay behind them.

“Lena,” they said together. “It’s time.”

She stumbled back, shaking her head. “Time for what?”

The wind swelled, rattling the branches until bark and needles flew. The voices overlapped, rising into a frantic harmony.

“To remember.”

And she did.

A memory she’d never known unfolded in her mind, of standing here as a child beside her mother, watching as the wind took shape for the first time. Her mother’s face had been calm, even reverent.

“It chose us,” she’d whispered, before the wind had poured into her like smoke, and she’d vanished, leaving only the echo of her name in the air.

Now Lena understood. The wind wasn’t speaking to her, but was speaking through her.

She fell to her knees, clutching her head as the gusts tightened around her, threading through her hair, her lungs, her thoughts. The forest blurred into motion.

Leaves and stones lifted into the air. The world seemed to bend inward toward her, folding itself into the hollow where she knelt.

When she screamed, the sound came out wrong, longer, deeper, a tone that belonged to the sky rather than the throat. The wind rushed in, filling her, carrying with it a thousand murmuring names, each one a life swallowed before hers.

Then, silence.

The storm broke with the dawn. The first sunlight touched the trees, and the air settled, calm and clean. The leaves drifted down, and the clearing was empty again.

At the edge of town, the wind stirred once more. It picked up leaves and danced them across the asphalt with the sound of broken glass and chandelier jewels. Then it spoke a name.

But it wasn’t Lena this time.

It was yours.