The Forest for the Trees
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Chapter 6: In Which Things Return to Normal, In Which Things Change
[i] Once upon a time, there once was a tree that grew with purple flowers. It did not grow alone. It grew under the shelter of strangers, kind and cruel, friends, and family. It grew from weakness into strength., basked in the golden glow of their love. And it grew to remember another story:
Once upon a time, he had been Seed. Once upon a time, he had lived, abandoned his life for a new one, grown a while, found family and friends and lovers, some he lost and some who remained, and died. But what could the little tree do? The body that lay tangled at its roots was not one the tree could convince to move again.
And then its elders knew what to do. They saw the spell the gods had cast and the kindness of the scurrying forms below. And they knew what the little tree had wished, what it had always wished. And so…They took their roots and reached down to the mangled, slightly burned, and somewhat decayed body at the core of the sapling. They tugged the sapling’s roots towards it again, pulling it around the body that it had once belonged to.
”It can be healed.” “It can.” “It can.” “Heal.”
And the sapling took the words and the feelings the deer had given it, and the trees of the wood and the little sapling that was once a deer began to work. Where the body was damaged, wood grew from its (for when was Seed’s body ever a he? Seed’s heart was a he; the gods didn’t care much for the difference) bones to fortify it. The trees covered the wounds with wood and moss and stirred the organs with life.
And at last, they said to the sapling,
”Go.
Thanks
