Chatterbox: Inkwell

Long ago, I passed a little tree. I passed it without much thought to it, disregarding it as just a regular tree. The part that faced the path was unremarkable, and I didn't to look at the other side. On the road, I recall, I passed a bent, smiling man with many masks on his merchant's pack. He smiled at me, but it seemed he awaited someone else. I carried on; traveled on to distant lands, but could never truly get that little tree out of my head. But, after a long time, it faded from my memory.

A while ago, I passed through those lands once more. There, still, was a little tree on the side of the road. It hadn't grown, and the dead leaves on its two branches looked like hands reaching away from the road, like a small child frozen while falling to the ground. A sense of great sorrow came over me as I passed, but I couldn't pin-point where it was coming from. Around the scrub, many flowers and other green things blossomed in droves, and I wondered how this could be if the tree in the center was so dead. On the way to my destination, a small man with a large hat and a green moustache passed me in the shadows. I didn't get a good look at him, but I've seen all sorts of odd people, so I paid him no mind. I traveled on; met new people, and learned to stop and enjoy the details in life.

And so here we are. Last night, I drempt I was back on that road, that road with the tree. There was the sound of weeping. I turned towards the tree. At its base, the small man I mentioned before knelt, sobbing. I reeled back. His skin was of wood, his hair of leaves, and his feet of a propeller-like structure. He shook with his cries, lamenting to the tree. Then, I woke up. I immediately travelled back to that tree, and found the same scene as in my dream. The wooden man didn't notice as I slunk around the tree trunk, not even as I fell to my knees.

The tree had a face. A realistic, youthful face, twisted in pain and frozen there. A wooden child, with  a splintered chest, as though its very heart had been ripped out. The eyes of the child were empty, and the gaping mouth was empty too. I could see that there was nothing left inside of the wooden shell. It was truly hollow, carved out by some evil magic. I stood there, weeping with the man, who looked at the statue like a grief-stricken father.

The one thing that truly terrified me, though, is that the monster that did this had done it long ago, and may or may have not done it to more of these wooden children. Not only that, but of how blind I had been all these years. I didn't stop even when every instinct was pulling me to know what had been done to this child.

A child who had come to a terrible fate.

How could I have been so blind?

~

A nod to The Legend Of Zelda: Majora's Mask's character, the Deku Child and his father's story. I don't know how well I've portrayed the real emotions that I feel when I think about this detail in the game, but I think I did a fair job.