The Heartwood Call me Mr. Rattlebone

The trees whispered to him and seemed to tell him stories from his childhood. They sounded like his mother, and the longer that he listened to them, the closer he came to losing his consciousness. It was not until the sound of another voice - foreign to him in every way – sounded through the wood. A single dark ear swiveled atop his head toward where she stood. The titan did not stir from his place in the dirt. Instead, he breathed outward and gritted his teeth together. All that his mind could register was pity on this foreigner's voice; pity and the tone of someone who felt as though they had stumbled on a scenario they did not wish to take part in.

“Once we stood beside the shore...”

His voice seemed to drawl from the back of his throat, bubbling against the blood that had pooled in his mouth. The words did not make sense in the context they were given, not even to him. The titan did not know himself or where he had come from. He did not know the woman who stood in the woods with him. Everything was foreign and it filled him with such rage that he could scarcely fathom how he had not erupted in eternal flame.

Then, his head lifted from the ground and turned slowly toward her. There was a lifelessness to his mismatched gaze. Ford latched his sights on her own and did not pull them away. It was as though he was looking into the eye of a swelling storm. For a moment, it seemed as though lightning flashed in his gaze. Above, there were no clouds to fill the blue of the sky. Even the crows had abandoned the wood in favor of better haunts. All would have been right in the world were it not for the savage creature of war that had wandered into the wild forest.

“I drowned him in the ocean and watched his body float to sea,” his smoky voice rasped coldly.

Time eats away at memories, distorts them. Sometimes we only remember the good... sometimes only the bad. It seemed as though he could remember some things, but none of them were good. There was nothing left but a pit of darkness where his soul had once been.