Chapter Text
It’s a sticky summer night when the young lovers find their way into your woods. The sun is nearly set. You have come to enjoy watching the idiosyncrasies of human interaction. Stumbling, handing each other stray wood, each trying to strike a fire and laughing when they finally succeed. There’s something so sweet, so magical about such interactions. Each year this happens. It brings you joy to see humans fall in love again and again.
It has been a long time since you had human arms, and even longer since you whispered softnesses into hair or wound around shaking knees. These two were particularly affectionate, peppering kisses and combing hair, and lounging freely across each other. Even after they have left your woods, you wonder at how strange it must be to be so … alone as a human. You and your trees are bound together at the roots. There is no life without separation for you. But humans choose to connect. They choose to reach out, to assist, to enjoy each other. A part of you envies them for it.
You are so lost in your imagination that you don’t notice the fire licking its way through dead leaves. You don’t notice the smokey air or the whispers of the trees around you. You don’t feel their roots tremble – until a sharp pain stings you into consciousness.
Your branches sizzle, sap sparking and cracking through your layers. Trying to focus, you reach your energy out to feel fire biting through the trees in your grove. It is only then that their silent screams come ringing through your roots.
Your grove. Your trees. Your fault.
Night winds rip the flames higher and higher. Fear and excruciating pain have paralyzed for too long. Centering your energies, you slide life from your trunk down to the Earth. You can’t remember the last time you used your human form, and it feels so soft, so foreign on the scorching Earth. Summoning water from the nearby stream and dirt from the ground, you begin to put out the flames of your neighboring trees. Your practiced limbs summon streams of water to jet into the grove. You can do this, you’ve done this before. Limbs lift dirt and drop it, suffocating flames as trees sizzle out. You can do this. A handful of trees into the process, your streams of Earth and water turn to a slow trickle. This cannot be good.
You turn to see your trunk… but you don’t. Only scarlet is visible against the night. Without your tree, you have no source to draw power from. You are cut off from your grove, your roots, everything that gives you strength. All energy – all hope for fixing this disaster the humans started– drains from you. You cry out. Knees buckle. Streams of water and earth weaken and fall. The smoke traps your cries midthroat and the truth of the moment finally seeps in.
It is too much fire. it is too much smoke. It is too strong. You have nothing left to stop it. The fire moves from tree to tree and you cannot even mourn for your companions. So you crumple. You watch your home disappear. There is nothing left to do. You can’t stop it or even fight it now. You’ve failed. You’ve lost everything.
Fingers wind around what once were your roots, feeling the hot earth between them once more. You feel the beat of the forest’s heart thrum dangerously fast. You feel it quicken at your collapse, the land realizing that its designated guard has fallen. You feel a web of roots futilely squirm deeper to avoid the heat. And you feel something else.
Thumping.
Running feet–heavy feet.
What kind of animal would run towards a fire? A huge figure lumbers into your clearing, cloth wound tight around its head.
A human?