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The day is mild, the wood relatively quiet, the area void of human presence for the first time in many days. The myriad ordinary sounds of nature going about its work are all there, of course — leaves stirring, birds calling, a branch falling somewhere unseen — as they always are, whether or not anyone is there to hear them.
Yet somehow, today, even these familiar, ever-present sounds feel just slightly muted. As if, almost, subdued. As if, almost — if one could ascribe such anthropomorphic qualities to nature — they are in mourning.
Among the other trees, rooted at the center of its own small clearing, are the shaven remains of a tree stump, some four or five meters in diameter. The tree was itself felled some weeks past, needlessly — by intent or error, it hardly matters. Destroyed beyond recall, its life now relegated to the fields of study and memory, millennia more of potential life and growth now forever unattainable.
There are no humans present today. Yet the trees, the undergrowth, and the other forest denizens are still not, entirely, alone. For among the trunks and roots are two man-shaped beings, their figures tiny in comparison to the massive growths looming above and surrounding them on all sides.
They are gazing, both of them, at the stump.
“I remember when you were small,” one murmurs, kneeling to lay a palm against the stump’s surface, and there’s none of the bite that’s usually to be found in his voice when talking to plants. “I remember when they first planted you." He turns, and looks upwards at his companion, an ache in his tone. “Do you remember?”
The companion nods, face as somber as the wind in the leaves.
“After the Flood,” he says, softly. “Na’amah’s seeds. The first new generation of fertility. Bringing the land back to life. Hope, rebirth, greenery.” He sighs, and drops to join the other on the ground beside the stump, placing his own hand on the wood as well. “We helped bless the sapling, so it would grow faster. I remember.”
The first nods back, silently. Their free hands find each other, resting together in the soil below.
And there in the quiet clearing, among the trees, two man-shaped beings remember that which has been lost, sharing the forest floor and grieving with some of the only earthly beings ancient enough for some small sense of fellow feeling.