A doe stood at the tree line, ears flicking toward me. She watched the scene as if she was waiting for my reaction.
I picked up the rose quartz, rolling it between my fingers. This? This was meant to honor me? I crushed it in my palm, let the dust fall.
In the old tongue, I said, “How has it come to this? Bits of rock?”
The doe blinked.
“Once, they understood what an offering was.” I turned over the remaining stones, watching how the light caught their dull, fractured edges. “A willing gift, a trembling touch, a life placed into my hands with trust and expectation. Now?” I let the pyrite fall. Useless shards scattered across the moss. “Now they give me rocks and call it worship.”
I dusted my hand against my tunic. The forest had no need for trinkets.
The doe was still watching.
“You remember,” I said. “When they loved me. When they feared me. When they came to me with something precious.”
The wind stirred through the trees, carrying a scent of damp leaves and distant rain. The deer lifted her head, sniffed the air, then stepped back and vanished easily between the trunks.
I stayed for a moment, staring at the empty space where she had stood. Then I walked on.
The deeper I went, the more I stretched into the land beneath me. I wasn’t bound to this place, either. Yes, I walked here, but I could just as easily walk somewhere else.
The root system connected all things in a vast web of unseen passageways. I could take a step here and emerge in an ancient grove across the sea, or a jungle where the air dripped with heat, or a forest that had been buried under shifting sands but still remembered its name.
For centuries, I had existed within those threads, slipping between the spaces where humans couldn’t tread. I’d let the forests be my only company.
And yet, I kept returning to this one.
I told myself it was obligation. The land still held power here, even if the people had forgotten how to wield it. The trees still called to me, even if the voices were quieter than they once had been.
But the truth lay deeper than that.
I had always been drawn to humanity. I would watch them from the edges, laughing at their arrogance, marveling at their persistence, taking them into my arms when they came to me willingly.
They used to come often. Some to seek wisdom, some to trade devotion for favor. And some for pleasure, pressing their bare bodies against me beneath the rustling canopy, gasping my name like a prayer.
It had been too long.
A spring-fed pool waited ahead. I crouched at the edge and looked down into its still, dark surface, to check my reflection.
Human enough.
My hair, wild as ever, hung past my shoulders. My beard sprouted a few small leaves, though they were easily smoothed away. My eyes—green as the depths of the oldest wood—glowed with something restless.
They had always burned too bright.
I thought of the flaxen-haired woman back at the gathering, the city creature who smelled of plastic and steel.
She’d met my gaze without looking away.
That alone made her different. Most humans either instinctively revered me or feared me. But she had only stared, curious and wary, as if I were something she needed to understand.
As if a mortal could ever comprehend.
The equinox was coming. The self-proclaimed druids would gather, chanting their half-remembered words, spewing their empty offerings. I could go anywhere—back across the sea, where some still understood the old ways. Or deeper into the unknown, where I wouldn’t need to deal with humans at all.
But instead, I stayed right where I was. I let the land settle beneath me…and turned toward the gathering once more.
3
