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17. Liyfy - Dead Tree Poet

Trees listen, people don't. At least when trees talk over you, there's a friendly rustling in their leaves, and the only retort they have to your stories is a gentle nodding of their branches. The only parts of her childhood that Liy could remember was sitting out in the woods with her notepad, penning words to her tree friends that nobody would ever hear. Everything outside of that wood was a blank sheet of paper. She never wrote anything outside of the single grove. All the outside world had given her was a memory like a sieve anyway.
Freshly out of a maths class she couldn't recall, Liy would sing gently, her ever present rage quelling in the lonely woodland sanctuary, like a woman in a cathedral praying to have her sins forgiven. She was dwarfed by these columns of wood. Sometimes she considered returning to the earth to become a part of what she loved, but she never followed through.
Pen on paper infinitely writing. Never stopping. Freezing in the cold in winter, but never dying. She tried to spend all her waking hours out there, singing to the trees, but the roar of life along the distant roads and her human hunger and thirst drove her back into the arms of amnesia. Yet by the time she returned to her clearing, nothing of the hour or so she spent away remained.
Now was a little different.
Now, she was older, living on her own in a little house in a forested valley, sowing and harvesting, away from the society that hurt so much to partake in. Nobody knew if she was alive. Nobody cared and she wanted to keep it that way. And every time a tree fell in the woods, she would weep, and take a knife to carve its final tattoo. A poem, especially for it. About its life, how it grew, when it fell, and the joy it gave her. Every tree brought happiness. Every loss during a storm or to disease brought pain upon pain, and blinding flashes of the land beyond the woods. Liy cared for these trees and only these trees. And that did not go unnoticed.
Liy often felt like she wasn't alone in her tiny hovel... a presence unlike that of human or animal resided nearby, and sometimes wandered near her. She felt it especially strongly when she was hard at work chipping obituaries into felled logs in the depths of winter, hands stiff and frozen to the bone, or curled up in a hollow in the height of summer, keeping her temperature even in the cool earth. Once or twice she had turned around to find the curious gaze of a stag, or bird, and once even a roaming badger, but most of the time she could see nobody nearby. A spirit, maybe? She liked to think so.
The spirit stood in the leaves a few feet away, watching her old companion tree being carved with a sonnet of its life. This human woman... a friend? Oh, how she hoped so.
A new tree, a young beech, became her next host. The dryad would sink into its bark when the dead tree poet came near, resting hands on living wood to feel its pulse, quelling her ever-present confusion. The rage in her from the past was strong, and her fear smelled sharp. The dryad wrinkled her spirit-nose in distaste; there was something, many things, that her brain was not digesting. There was a dam somewhere in there that she had been keeping from bursting for years. Perhaps that was why she lived a hermit's life up here, alone... she had so much inside that brain of hers, but most of it was the horrors of the past. She came here to mourn and heal what wasn't hers, to distract her from the healing she needed.
Sometimes she would perch on a branch, her thin, almost translucent skin glowing from high up in the branches, hoping the human lady would notice. She never did, somehow: looked right through her.
At night, when the range cooker bubbled with earthy potatoes and the kettle whistled like a high wind through the branches, the dryad would creep up to the window and watch the woman in her chair, eyes tight shut and thinking about her forest. For it was hers... the dryad nodded to herself. Those who look after the woodland also reap the benefits of its beauty. Perhaps she could do something to help the forest give back to her.
A cold night in midwinter, Liy had the sudden, unshakeable feeling that somebody lay next to her in bed. The gentle whisper and cold fingers across her collarbone - beckoning. The trees cheered outside, frost glittering on their leaves. Liy was up in an instant. She didn't bother getting dressed. Down the stairs, hall. Shoes on. Out of the door.
Oh, the forest! Never different yet never the same, reaching out to her in the frozen night as the branches parted to show the light of the full moon, that which seemed larger and closer to earth than Liy had ever seen. The trees clapped in a hundredfold applause, tiny voices joining them in laughter and gratefulness. And there, in front of the moon, was the hovering form of Leafy... Leafy herself, that which was lost and forgotten.
By the moonlight, the two realised and recognised. Liy and Leafy... friends... dryad and human, spirit and flesh. They had thought they lost each other, but the brain keeps memories, even if they're long locked away. The pain of losing her childhood friend. Leafy, the memory of her death stung, but eased as she felt her body rise closer to the moon. Her age dropped off her in layers. To be young again, to hold her hand, to run through the trees and truly live, forever, the dryad and the dead tree poet!

sowwy if that was too cryptic, I just wanted to write it a lot :>
there's somebody who carves obituary poems on felled trees near my house and I think that's really neat