I always wondered about the whisper hound in Fablehaven :o I just found it hard to believe that it was nothing but a spell. I dun really know what this is xD It's kind of disconnected. I just wanted to write it ;u;
Enjoy! xD
Quietly, like a whisper, I came into being and quietly, like a whisper, is how I shall exit the world. All in due time. I've learned, through experience at last, that the best strategy to know things is to wait.
Existence is cold like a north wind whipping through cobwebs, sharp and bitter and achingly awaking. Feeling is different from what I had before, the drive to protect. To endlessly patrol. Fear, fear of losing the ones I had to protect.
It's different now, although I don't know how. Now I protect out of love, out of the warmth of my nonexistent heart, if you will.
Memories soak into me, enriching me. You don't notice a breath of cold air until it wants to be noticed, I suppose. I see all, and from what I see, I realize. Knowing is something new for me; before, I only saw, only heard. Now, I know, I listen.
I believe that nobody knows about me. It is a foolish belief; all living things are known at least once, and then they die. But first they are known, or it is-really-as if they had never existed. I watch the humans come and go. I watch from the shadows as a girl sits in front of the Quiet Box, as a boy sneaks out of the house again, as a woman in an old housecoat bangs on the door to the basement.
It is a shock to be discovered, like waking from a confusing dream and finding that years have passed. Harsh voices and then silky voices, like fingertips sliding over an oily surface, like the sharpest knife in the world slicing through flesh and bleeding. Blood is something I know, pulsing through the veins of my short-lived charges.
For the first time in my "life", I am treated like a conscious being, and it is not pleasant. I keep silent, whisking around them as a cold breeze, but it's harder to stay insubstantial now.
"Who is the caretaker of Fablehaven?" Kendra Sorenson. I keep silent. I'm not even sure that I have a voice, come to think of it. The man- a man, although wrapped in black cloth and dark magic- pauses and then continues.
"Where is the artifact?" My mind flashes back to when they installed the new artifacts, Kendra and Bracken coming back from the preserve breathless and excited and smelling of magic.
A longer pause. "Do they know?"
Know what… ?
"That you," the voice breathes, "are conscious?"
I freeze and almost become nothing but a cold patch of air on the hard floor.
"You haven't signed the register, have you?" The register. I suppose I haven't. I suppose I don't care.
The man sighs, straightening up. "At any rate, it doesn't matter. A conscious whisper hound is a curious thing, but I suppose you aren't really what I came for."
What?
The next thing I remember is black and colder than my own cold.
Listening is what I'm best at, what I'm created for, after all. I listen in on their conversations, sneaking around shadows like I used to sneak around the dungeon.
After the wards and the whisper hound were gotten rid of, it was simple to infiltrate the preserve. Fablehaven will fall, finally.
I'm not worried, to be honest. People are ephemeral- they come and they go, like flowers, like clouds passing across the sky. Kendra Sorenson may fall, but I believe that Fablehaven will stand.
In time, they will find another whisper hound. Not me. I will fade away quietly. I have failed to serve my purpose. One may come to have a consciousness, but in the end, a purpose was all I lived for. Now that I've lost that, I am nothing.
From nothing I came, so it's only right that to nothing I will go back to.