the moon lies bare, deflowered by force then abandoned
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."
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."
@Below Zero ooc: here's a plate full of words in no particular order at all. <3
