The Curator

The trees here do not whisper; they remember. I learned this after the third day, when the bark began to ripple with faces that were not faces—impressions of something that had passed by, eons ago. I call it Mnemos. I have never seen it. I only live in its aftermath.

It doesn’t have our emotions. It doesn’t know fear or hate. It has a colder, broader intellect, one that curates. It finds things of interest—a specific pattern of moss, the precise sound of a snapping twig, a moment of pure animal terror—and it preserves them. Not like a trophy, but like a scholar. The terror is its favorite pigment.

The trees hold the echoes. The rocks hum with trapped sounds. Yesterday, I found a clearing where the air was thick and motionless, saturated with a perfect, crystalline record of a deer’s final heartbeat. I could feel the thrum in my teeth. It was beautiful and it was vile.

It knows I’m here now. My novelty is irresistible. It’s not hunting me. It’s… studying. It is dissecting my loneliness, my growing dread, sampling each new flavor of my despair with academic detachment. It peels my emotions from the air and stores them in the willow leaves, which now weep with a sadness I haven’t even felt yet.

Last night, I heard my own voice from a day prior, a mere gasp of surprise, played back from a cluster of mushrooms. Clear as a bell. A new exhibit.

Soon, it will tire of sampling. It will want the complete work. My end won’t be a death, but an inscription. My final, mortal terror will be captured, perfected, and made permanent. A little masterpiece of agony, etched into the forest forever.

And I will become a part of the gallery, a ghost in a museum built for a collector who has never seen a human, but who now finds us fascinating. The trees will wear my face, and the wind will play my screams on a loop, for an audience of one, forever.