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The first palistrom tree in generations not grown in an arboretum is ready to be harvested in the wild and you have been given the honor of cutting it down. You know how rare this wood used to be, but with the time pools unlocked and their powers harnessed, whole plantations can spring up in an instant. The best time to plant a tree is decades ago, but the second best time is today after going through a time pool to decades ago.
There is some pomp and circumstance, some photo ops, some speeches, including one by yourself. You attend your own speech, in that you are just aware enough to function. If you were to start choking up, you know the tears and snot will be ceaseless, so you don’t pay attention to the words you say, which definitely include “Flapjack.” Your heartstrings vibrate, plucked, but you are only a listener. Everyone applauds anyway, meaning you did well, meaning your vision is unmisted at the end.
The palistrom tree is standing. The palistrom tree is felled. Others divide it limb from limb with almost ravenous intent. You pick the segment that calls to you. A chunk of palistrom wood lands in your hand. You’ve done the easy part.
There was never any question about what you would carve. When you’ll carve, on the other hand, becomes something of a joke. You practice on normal wood, hundreds and hundreds of blocks, none of which look exactly like him but all of which make your throat full of the urge to weep. You shake off the idea that the discard piles resemble the crushed bones and masks that were almost you. Like Belos, you are seeking perfection. Unlike Belos, you can achieve it. Your palisman will be perfect from its first breath for being itself.
What you’re carving, whittling, and sanding away with these trials isn’t only wood, but your reluctance to move on. Your love for each other is eternal, but Flapjack isn’t coming back. You need a palisman. Again: your love for each other is eternal, but Flapjack isn’t coming back. You need a palisman. Repeat until you believe it, until you hear it in your dreams.
You spend hours marking the wood for even the first cut, not because you are worried you will get it wrong, but because the grief is the rawest when the knife is in your hand. You make the cuts anyway, because this must be done.
Caleb Wittebane was a better woodcarver than you will ever be, but you have the advantage of power tools from the human realm. You use them sparingly, to get the rough shape, with your lip bitten or your tongue out all the while. People always look silliest when they are too focused to remember they are being watched, and so do you.
You carve alone in the morning. You carve as your friends come and go during the day. You carve alone at night. As you doze, someone has the foresight to take the blade from you and wrap you in a blanket, setting the partial palisman on the table, its wood touching the handle as if conspiring.
The work is slow, painstaking. You are deliberate in your differences. Flapjack had a scar when you met him, but this one will not. You had some scars when you met him, then you got more. Life is a series of scars, so you are not concerned about those details. They will come into place by themselves.
You carve the wings a little longer, the sternum a little wider, the crest a little smaller. It’s okay. Your hands are not the ones that made Flapjack. You aren’t looking to make Flapjack, only to remember him in making another cardinal.
Your new palisman looks like Flapjack like you look like Caleb. The reflection is there, the echo of the past, but inspiration is not destiny. That is a lesson you are still learning. She will be born with you whispering it in her ear.
It takes three days, which you know is a long time. Every sanding stroke is worth it. When she takes her first shivering breath, you fall to your knees and the world becomes blurry.
You kiss her. You tell her you love her, and that she is the sister— or maybe daughter? How does that work?— of a brave and loving bird named Flapjack who was your friend and saved your life. Despite the constant streams from your eyes and nose, she understands. You hand feed her her first rattle worms. As an afterthought to the significance of those things, you tell her that your name is Hunter and that she is your palisman.
You still don’t know her name. You come up with suggestions with the intent of having them vetoed. There will never be another Flapjack, or a Flapjack the Second. You crack Flapjane as a joke, almost flippantly, but she takes it in stride, flying to your shoulder and tweeting it over and over so you know what it sounds like. It would destroy you to nickname her Flap, so you go for Jane.
This is not quite parenthood but not unlike it, accelerated. You show her who she is and where she comes from. You have a five minute version of the arc from the past to the present, hitting the high points: Caleb, Evelyn, Grimwalker, Golden Guard, Hunter, Flapjack, but soon you’re reading Witch Hunters of Gravesfield to her in an affected and dreadful Deadwardian accent. She is such a good thing to happen to you. You can deny your past to yourself, but you would not lie to her.
Time and magic make coincidences inevitable. With the time pools as the source for collecting Palistrom seeds, it is only natural the tree you cut down was from the same grove as the tree that Flapjack was carved from, despite the centuries between. You decide that means she and Flapjack are cousins.
You have Penstagram photos and videos of her cousin to show her, so much that you had to upgrade to premium to store all of your doting on Flapjack pecking and cooing and dancing and flying. Caleb didn’t have anything like that, but Jane will. Nevertheless, you’re not in a rush to get through them. After all, you have the rest of your lives together.
You kiss Jane on the top of her beak. You take a picture of her sleeping on your robes and send it on Penstagram to Luz. Your typing is nearly error-free, and fast enough for functionality, if you do say so yourself. You kiss Jane again. You make your own parallels now.