There is great honor found within greater silence - the quiet of a tree is noble, it is grand.  Once upon a limb or two ago, I was something spectacular.  I have seen so many eyes gaze upon me in wonder, in awe, and even disbelief.  I know you.  I have known your mothers and their mothers.  I have sheltered your families for years and provided for all of that which you call your own.  


What few of us who have survived you, have fallen prey to the invaders you introduced into our forests with your carelessness.  We have been quiet for too long, the forests have decided in their dying quietude, that they will finally answer for their lost families.   It first begins with a death, then starts a new life, mine.


I was born strange in the hollows of a one hundred year old cedar, small, white, and frail like the larvae that rend the bark from the flesh of our trees.  The forest called me Duir for first four years of my tellurian life, but when the great horns of my grove began to emerge from my brow - my own grove chose to name me after some pagan story that passenger once whispered in the woods.


 Cernunnos, a horned god.  I am not God, but my horns reminded my family the one in the story.  For this quiet, private grove had never seen horses before, they had all been seeds atop the ground, just like I once was when the Aïranacht walked our rooted paths.  Those had been our mother’s, now shattered and scattered ghosts across our rootbeds.  Their memories had faded just like the color of their sustenance had, no one remembered them, they were now just a part of the earth.


I was once a mother too, two thousand, nine hundred, and seventy-eight winter moons ago, I reached up to draw the stars into my many arms for the first time in my prime.  I breathed in the moon, all her sorrows and her light, sighing in storms and crisp autumn airs.  I cannot remember the last time I tasted silver but it has come to my understanding that the forest wants from me, different things now.


Our final journey is to understand the world which we hold so dear to us.  To understand the rest of all that which we do not know.  To go where our roots can not reach.  We are changed over enough time.  We are born into the world like the others we now share skins with.  Though young and naive and so very stupid like a sapling, what we already know, we still understand.  And this must be instinct, our very keys to survival.


Now I have become something perverse within nature.  Something unruly and indistinct from my beech heritage.  I have seen it in the water, when it rains and puddles form in the grove.  Within those rain slick mirrors, quicksilver and true, I see what has changed within me.  I had unbecome everything I used to always be.  I am no longer an archetype of Time itself but a passenger of it instead. My journey into consciousness has begun - this is the gift of Life after death. 


I am old enough to understand what I know (and I know a few things).  The gravity of my situation has changed substantially, so many other factors have been absorbed into the orbit of my new world.  For five years now, I have honed survival into a considerable skill, still wild and feral as the day the cedar carried me into Viride as a fauna, no longer flora.  



…



“I say, the air tastes strange to me.”   To the birds, he says.   Two tits twitter, trill, and tip about in their trysts within the spindly branches of his horns, dead leaves flicker in the breeze which musses his mane.  Cernunnos suddenly sneezes and the company ghosts him so quickly he is offended by their anxious nature, a leaf continues to tick-tick-tick-tick-tick against the base of his woody horns and he can hear it echoing in his ears from how hollow the roots are which grow beneath his skin.  The pale flesh shows their veiny reaches between bone and papery striped white bark.  Where Cernunnos sits comfortably in the gilded grove while late afternoon sun angles in underneath the tangles of a thick and elderly oak canopy, he is invisible.


“Do you think a storm is coming soon?”  He looks up, two long thin birch trees sway back from the motion of his head.  Leaves fan and feather out, some come off and glide down-down-down to the ground.  Birds in neighboring branches seem to discuss whatever it is that bothers them about their living perch without much concern over Cern’s questions.  He can look up and spy the sky from the bare patches in the canopy, by the amount of gray reflected in his eyes - a storm brews.  He has felt it coming for days, the cold air sneaking in over the currents of a persistent summer.  But now frost has come twice to him, damn near chilled every leaf off his horn, and caused Misty to go dormant for the winter.  Birds flock him in his sleep in an attempt to grab whatever remains of the mistletoe’s snowy berries before there is none left for the season. 


“I said, do you think a storm is coming soon!”  What is different now is that Cern can no longer hear the words of the birds which used to do so much more than just sing and startle when around him.  Never the less, the apostlebird group, who has grown up in his branches, still returns year after year, and in turn raises its progeny to do so as well.  Unlike all the other visitors that he can no longer rely on for conversation, the apostles trustv im even in their silence.  Something within their presence still soothes him, their inability to communicate with each other verbally does not prohibit Cern’s ability to understand what they want from him - what they need as well.


“Forget you, ruddy birds!”  A crack of thunder sounds and Cern is up, moving and shaking with life, graceful and fluid like a leaf on the wind even in his stormy flurry.  Hair flows like spidersilks in the breeze, the leaves stream like schools of fishes in the air, and the branches that carried them bend and sway as the terrulian decides his path.  Cernunnos begins to press forward into the trees but his visage is so overgrown that it is not long until he becomes entangled.  Grumpily, he rakes his head down and shakes the birch free from the low grabbing hands of the oak.  He does not want to be in the dell when the rain starts to fall - and he will creep into the pine for the duration of it all when the weather takes a turn for the worst.  


And it does.  Terribly so.  It is as loud as it is bright.  It is as wet as it is electric.  It is as active as the throes of raging spring rapids.  Only bears can endure a strength like this - Cernunnos has seen it himself.


Thunder grumbles its dispute over the tangling currents of hot and cold winds, lightning takes on the form of his elders as it branches wild and wondrous across the sky.  One strike takes an oak, causing Cern to press deeper into the wood.  The smell of ozone causes a great unrest in the beast and he moves away from it like prey from a predator. The rain soaks through the outermost layers of Viride and begins to make its way into the lower levels with its heavy pour.  The birch-bark stallion can feel the first drops of it down his back.  Soon he is the color of moving water, light, and shadows as the rain soaks him. 


A leonine tail slithers quickly through the trees like some banded alder-beast as he quickens his pace -- wending through familiar trails in the dense copse of unexplored woods.  He knows them well, and has spent his whole live(s) both growing within them, and can use them with his eyes closed if he must.  Tonight is no different, the storm has come upon him quickly.  Even though he knew of its presence days ago, it has still caught him by surprise.  And for once, it has driven him farther from his grove than he has been for quite some time.  Even though the paths remain familiar, his uncertainty rises the same way fear does, cold sets in and his thin-skinned coat cannot stand it.  Hail mercilessly begins to pepper through all the spaces Cern tries to avoid until he finds a cedar, almost as large and as round as he once was, and beneath the vale, a bare and perfectly dry earth.

Wind whips and rages as a great storm moves through the otherwise placid territory.  Even though the storm’s reach can hardly make it down into the thicker parts of the forest where Bel and Cern are hiding, it can still berate them with pine cones and branches.  It scatters needles and seeds and leaves from the tops which are being battered by the eye which looms above them.  He would blame it on the Gods, but he knows better than that — their ire is much worse than this, and they will move mountains when provoked, not treetops.

He wants to say so much but a peel of thunder takes his lionlike gusto and makes a kitten out of it.  Cern’s horns rattle and click, a reverberation from shivering in his bones.  “Not to be a real stick in the mud, we are safer under this tree.”  Cern’s orange eyes are as wide and round as Halloween pumpkins in the dark, and the great oak is reduced to timber and fatwood.  Underneath the dense canopies, the wind makes breezeways out of the path.   

Lightning strikes so close, it licks a dead tree not too far off the path which lead him to here and paints it neon.  Instinctively he drops his head as the underneath of the forest illuminates xerox white with bright light.  The two of them shuffle closer underneath the dense protection of a fir tree whose trunk is so thick around and sculpted that together they can find some solace against the chilly winter wind.  

Comfortably cradled within the protective embrace of a three hundred year old forest giant as put the birch bark boy to ease, now, Cern can talk.

“I am Cer—”  think again, thunder growls again, the stallion wilts when lightning promptly follows, “--, Cernunnos.  It is good to meet you.   May I branch out and ask, where are you from Bel?”  Even in a torrential storm such as this, he cannot ignore the steam rising and pooling around her (around them, really) or the cool, amphibiousness of her skin which is pressed against his dry, papery, birch-like skin.  The two of them smell like cedar and salt together, the land finally meets the sea.

I answer none of her questions.  I humor no part of her curious poking.  I respond to nothing but the storm rattling on up above.  The thunder is moving away, the lightning strikes are growing farther and farther apart, and we are no longer in danger of being berated by ice.  Bel remains tucked in against me and I cannot bring myself to understand what this sensation is of being so close to something else that is living. 


Do not get me wrong, I have felt others before, against me; bears clawing my skin apart,  birds picking away at my bark.  Squirrels and deers having a field day stripping my branches of their tender green leaves both fresh and dry.  Winter makes a meal out of me, if I seem distracted it is because I am.  It is only when the silence grows longer and longer that I realize something .. my fish out of water is waiting for my response.

You seem more like a tree than a horse.  

“Oh horse ..”  Because I forgot what animal I had become when I died the last time, "I forgot that is what we call ourselves.  Hn,"  My eyes seek out the distance ahead of us.  I know these woods.  I know the other animals that live in them as well and they aren’t the best company once the sun begins to set.  We have the afternoon to decide what we will do now that the storm is running out on us.  Slowly, surely, more and more silently, the growling element moves westward leaving us in the alpenglow of its wake. 

“Well climb my limbs or follow me. I believe it is passing like a breeze.”  Perhaps the land and sea could work together, I wonder.

Immediately we are making our way through the soggy underword of dead branches.  The snags tugging my head don’t hurt anymore because the branches snap or just tangle with the foliage.  I have grown used to fighting for room in the dense copse of my home. The disease has reduced the virility of my tips anyway and so they just break.  Trees were not meant for moving much, healthy or not.  It is  only in the wind where we can sway and thrash in place, occasionally losing a limb in the process if we are too old, too sick, and have grown brittle in our years of fighting disease deep in our piths.  

“If you come from the stars, whyever would you want to leave such a place?  I come from here, and our whole lives are spent reaching for the one star that belongs to us.   Once we touch one, it is believed that we become a part of the universe- we transcend our rootbeds and our eldergrowth.  We are made to finally understand everything.”   And what I mean by that is we become mortal, then we live, and officially die.  I look up at the sky but it is daytime and there are no stars.  “Not so long ago, when our world began to start shaking, I touched a star with my leaves.  They weren't big ones or small ones, pointy ones or round ones, but they were green ones, healthy ones.  That was the night of my uprooting.”  I do not know how to talk to a person.  I never learned how. My words were disjointed and heavy.  I didn't seem to understand the art of Ease.  But I also really don't care enough for the living at this point, for it was their disease that brought on my untimely demise. 

I lead her through the dell, another patch of pine, deeper and deeper in we go.  I humor her with stories about all the birds I've ever known - and there are many.  I think my favorite story is about the apostlebirds, "No matter where I go, they always come back, every year.  That nest there in my branches is theirs.  When it rains, I get muddy.  They aren't very good at nest building, but they get better every year."  In the light, it is clear that some mud has streamed down a part of my hair - I really don't care about that though.  We keep walking.

The language of the forest sounds like wind, nothing like the grunting noises the living make to communicate with one another.  I have had years and years and years to master the art of grunting along with them to get my point across, trees have a lot of insight and that you can always depend on.  All those years spying on travelers slipping through the wood beneath our boughs, silent as shadows they may be, but their secrets are o u r s. Viride has given back to me, with what little magic needed to be spared, a body of birch and wicker to break the silence.  I am here to give back to the forest what so many others have taken from it!

And, despite the natural self-loathing I feel for being hosted in a body that needs to eat green to survive, I know it is all for the betterment of Viride.  I exist only to communicate my message.  My life is short.  My time is limited and I can count it by the hundreds of legs crawling around beneath my skin, I can feel the spiders weaving graves in my hair.  The mistletoe creeps carefully, cautiously through the winnows of downy cotton white hair.  Insects both toxic and benign to me, nest in the sere papery layers of beautiful rot. I try to think of my mission to distract myself from the sounds of dying.  I only know what it is to grow, not die.  What Tempus must think of a breather such as I?  


Communication is key, one horse at a time, and I must keep searching until I find the one who can heal this pain.  Even in this corporeal form, I am not immune.  With this skin and these horns, and all the light that makes the mistletoe grow, I am being eaten alive by the same plague that brought Duir down so long ago. 

“I died here.”  I say with reverence.  We take a pathway which opens up into the hazy light of the stormy afternoon.  Birds begin to pick up where they left off.  They skip through the trees overhead as I embark on the beginning of my spiritual journey, expecting Bel to follow simply because she seems so curious.  In speaking the uninvited truth of my being here, I have removed my soul and replaced it with ere mysticism.  “Here.”  

And so we stop.

There seems to be nothing here, if one were to be looking for hair and bones they would find nothing, and there are large rocks that should be skulls or shoulders or hips -- none of the sticks are bones either -- just pieces of trees brought down by the quick and violent storm.  These things are my bones, and we have come to think so little of green branches removed from their mother.  Young seeds that will never be sewn.  Birdsong lessens the harshness of my words, “I have never left this forest.”  All around us are ancient elders.  Winter may have stilled them on the surface, but they are filled with such vibrance and gold on the inside!  How they speak to me.  Welcome home Duir, they say, and to them I can only wish my time here brief enough so that I may become an oak again, one day.   

Ahead, in the haze of winter and mist, lies a monolith of a tree that is sudden, and severe, and sobering.  It is so large, so old, so covered with life and death and the moment of renewal (it seemed to glow like a Mother), that it becomes a universe of its own.  It is sacred. 

Blistered bark splits and spills a new life from it - a life separate but still a part of me.  All these years later, and all the roots that dug deep and wound their way through and through and through, still grasp for the last nutrients they can have.  I can feel the strife beneath my feet.  I know, that they know, that it is for naught.  That the nutrients will never reach the silent heart of the felled great beast.  Mosses and ferns, bushes and brambles, creeping vine, peppits and poppits, and even a great cedar which grows red and vulgar right out of the thickest part of the oakwood have used my rotting corpse to thrive.  The cedar's own living, breathing, roots wrap and weave through the intricate woody structures that the first of me spent centuries building.  Just as I died here, I was born here too.  

Carpets of bark have simply flaked away, easy to do when there is no inner bark to protect the cambium from disease.  The naked parts are blue-white with strange alien crop circles where larvae from the invading leafcutters have laid their eggs and have allowed for them to eat their way through the fleshy inner layers.  I can feel my heart still at some of the damage that still remains like scars on my soul.  The deep red slash in my chest aches as a painful reminder that while I am alive, I am also dying quickly, quietly, and regardless of any care I will receive of the horses.  The same poison rests in my bones.  I hear it at night, crawling around beneath my skin. 

"This forest is sick.  Viride is rotting."