Fire Flowers

1: Sun Disks

     I stared into the canopy, just as my eyes open. The sunlight fragmented through the leaves warms my face. It left everything with the light green hue that made the forest seem like a room of its own. Birds chirped gently in the branches of other trees all around me. I heard small yelps from below me, the miniature foxes that wandered my forest wrestled with each other. I loved to watch them, they had large ears and eyes and little black noses. Their fur the color of fire speckled with little brown dots. Their large puffy tails were pointed up into the air as they faced off against each other. There were five of them below me, all ready to pounce onto one another. I slipped down the tree and landed near to them. They all suddenly stopped there feud and skipped over lightly and happily. The little foxes cold wet noses brushed against my legs as they smelled me. They seemed reassured that it was me and then moved off to play again. I took a deep breath. It was a bright and happy morning, despite the massive grey wall that dominated the horizon. The trees leaned to meet me as they did every morning. Flowers grew along the ground and the closest branches, little purple buds that brightened the browns and greens. I smiled a wide happy smile, I lived day by day, the world was not perfect I knew that, yet I tried to keep myself happy. I stopped admiring my forest for a moment even though I loved it so.

     There was a gentle breeze in the air, that carried the wonderful scent of lavender and honeysuckle through the trees. I began to walk through the trees again, the leaves filtering green light towards the ground. The path through the trees was ever changing, yet it cleared for me and was easy to walk through. The creatures of my forest roamed it happily. My forest was unlike the other forests, it was imbued with an old and powerful magic. Despite being born in the year of the Great Burning, I had been graced with this deep and old magic. My life tree and my forest had been lucky to sprout inside the walls of an established sanctuary. I walked along my path, listening to the creatures that roamed around just out of sight. I saw a pair of blue birds flying through the sky just above my head.

     Soon I found myself on the outer edge of my forest staring out into town. It was just down the hill from my forest. The rather small town had only one main road. The little market stalls and some more established buildings, which stood slightly squat and bulky in comparison to the places I had read about in the Ancient Scripts. There had been a time before the humans and dryads had gone to war there had been a sort of kinship between them. Dryads had passed magic between humans then, but the humans found more consolation in their machines. They had lost their way and abandon us. For a long time they did not bother us, for they had forgotten us. We migrated to desolate places beyond their reach. We lived close and cramped, but we were happy. The humans continued to expand their bounds and soon there was nowhere left to hide. It started with suspicion of each other, but soon we were declared dangerous. They were greedy, they wanted only the land we had and the trees we owned. They had destroyed almost everything by then. Other than our precious sanctuaries. Then the war began, for a while gruesome and deadly wars took place between soldiers, but then they began to burn the forests. Dryads fled out into the far reaches of the world as fire rained from the sky. Taking the seeds of their life trees, dryads fled. They built up massive walls in ash deserts to keep the humans out. Then the Great Burning came, they burned everything. Anything that would burn, it was is if the world had been lit on fire. The hidden communities were all that was left. The humans dug into the ground and made massive complexes. Only a couple cities were above the ground, heavily defended and walled off. The magicless dryads whose trees had been burned, were enslaved their long lives and the lack of the need for food made them perfect for the humans work. Dryads without there trees turned sickly and frail, their skin would pale and their hair blacken. Their eyes would turn into lifeless black orbs. Those who watched from the few sanctuaries were helpless, rebellion would mean being enslaved. It was better to be here, then a slave who was worked to death. They talked about their decisions at public meetings and asked if everyone was okay with that. Some weren't, yet they made no move to leave.