Harrow

The voice was the distillation of nature's filth and fouler aspects through a crucible of death, decay and decades unnumbered. As fungi eat away at a corpse of a tree until only the loam and mulch remains, incubating the festering damp darkness under Greylock Forest. The voice was nature stripped of beauty. A bird stripped of feathers; the death of a tree in winter; broken antlers tipped with blood. Natural. The voice was crackling oak and torn leather. Distorted like a poor uncanny imitation of life, with skin like a roughened pelt stretched tight over the burl of a diseased tree. The visage of a human face carved into wood; an idol to the old and shapeless gods of the primeval forest, worshipped before man had formed words to name them. Bestowed now with this skin pinned into its grain as if it were enough to grant it life. Yet live, it did. The creature seemed to consider him, cocking his head with an organic groan of timber being bent to the point of splintering.