From The First Forest
It begins, where few stories do, with a curious carpenter, an ancient magic, and a moving tree.
I started life as a sapling, deep in the knots of the Midnight Wood, just as all trees had before me. As I grew taller, and my twigs turned to branches, and my roots grew thick, I felt fed. I was enriched by the energy of the forest and yet a gloominess crept over me. A shadow far heavier than the ones belonging to the canopy above. I was fixed in place, condemned to grow here and die here. What would that say about my life if the beginning were the same as the end? Getting older and taller is not growing. Changing, yes, but I would not truly grow without new memories. I didn’t want to stay rooted like the other trees. I wanted to explore the Wood. Not just my part of it, but all of it. I wanted to move through its soils and drink from its streams. I wanted to find its borders and stretch out to the great beyond, where the land lay dormant and the trees fell silent.
I thought it would be difficult to uproot myself at first, after so long being stuck in the same spot, but once my mind was made, it was easy. I disrupted the dirt around me, and the old, compacted soil shed from my roots like layers of bark. I continued to lift my main roots above the soil, creating long thin cuts in the forest floor. These disruptions cleared the way for my auxiliary roots which rose out of the cuts in a chorus of hollow snaps.
Breaking from my wooded chains was not the end. To be truly free I had to learn to move. If uprooting myself had been easy, learning to move was precisely the opposite. Progress was slow and trees grew larger around me, as I wiggled, then shuffled, dragging myself through the rising layers of sodden leaves. I fell into a steady rhythm eventually and learnt how to channel my energies to the right roots at the right time. I wasn’t fast but I was moving. After many suns and moons I had finally freed myself from my rooted prison.
I brushed past hundreds of my ancestors as I grew accustomed to my newfound abilities. I did wonder what stopped them from moving too, at first. The wind carried their jealous whispers and for a moment I even considered myself unique amongst my rooted brethren. Not until much later, until it was far too late, did I learn that these weren’t whispers of envy. They were whispers of warning. Trees could move should they wish to, but for thousands of generations, most had chosen not to. This was not out of stubbornness as I first thought, But as an act of preservation. For there were all sorts of moving lives beyond the Midnight Wood and one kind, the humans, small but cunning, were fascinated with my ancestors' magic.
The trees moved freely through the woods during the earliest foundations of humanity but soon human populations grew larger, their desires more complex, their greed more fervent and their compassion much rarer. It’s sad to think that humanity would so readily embrace such a permanent act, like destroying us, simply to exploit the temporary magic we’re made of. It was even sadder to think that the story of humanity was so much a part of our own beginnings and yet now, at the end of everything, I had outlived their story.
Given humanity’s magnetism to magical power, you can only imagine, then, the look on the carpenter's face, when he saw a moving tree on the edge of the woods one night. He had never seen a thing like it but, whatever it was, he knew it must be powerful magic. He didn’t know me. He cared not to know me. All he saw in me was an opportunity that was his for the taking. And me? I had taken the safety of my stillness for granted. I was naive and I saw this now, but I didn’t regret my decisions. I knew at the time that I’d rather be free and be chased, than be safe but be trapped.
As time passed, I became very familiar with the carpenter. It seemed as though he’d chase me to the ends of the world to learn my secrets, and I’d take him there, if it meant I could learn them too. It went on this way until the leaves reddened and fell in the midnight wood, then grew again in shades of greens and purple. Until one night, roaming my world, I stopped to drink. I embedded my roots into a shallow river, letting the fresh water flow over me, while I drew more water, fresher still, from the rocks below. It was a slow process that usually took the night and left me vulnerable for an uneasy length of time. This night however, as the moon was new, I was sure I was safe. The carpenter only hunted on a full moon, when the sky was at its brightest. I needn’t worry about him.
I stood slumped in the river as my purple-black leaves rustled in the wind, the winds cool touch emboldened by the muted blue hue of the stars above. I trembled from its force, and would have shivered from its chill too, if I felt such things.
It's sudden.
That transition between calm and chaos.
Even if you’re expecting it, it’s still sudden.
Something I could feel now, a splitting pain, screamed from my roots and up through my heartwood. The Carpenter had appeared from the shadows and swung his sharpened stone deep into the base of my trunk. Again, he struck, faster and more violently. And again. And again. And again. Each time the pain would multiply, reaching every leaf tip and branch end. The assault felt like it lasted a lifetime, until eventually I fell. I had been cut clean from my still embedded roots and now lay bare across the riverbank. My branches crunched under my weight and my leaves scattered into the air in flocks of violet plumes. The end of my trunk lay severed and shattered at the edge of the river, and large globules of golden sap captured the starlight as they drained from my heartwood into the crystal waters. I screamed, or at least it felt how I’d imagine a scream would feel. My pain was so loud I still often wonder if the carpenter heard my suffering in that moment, or felt it perhaps. If that’s why, in the hours after felling me, he sat with his back against my fallen trunk and wept.
Humans are always meddling in magic they don’t understand. It’s usually their insatiable curiosity that drives them, rather than any malicious intent. On this we cannot fault them. Curiosity is, after all, the ember that lights the flames of knowledge. What I saw in the carpenter’s eyes that night, however, what I felt in the very fibers of his being, transcended curiosity’s appetite. I saw violence and obsession. I saw the compulsion of greed.
My roots were gone. I had lost my tether to the natural world. But the magic that flowed through my grain stayed with me.
Even after I was dragged out of the forest by the carpenter, cut and shaped by his tools, disassembled and reassembled into a thousand smaller parts, my magic did not weaken.
An age had passed before I was able to move in my new structure. For as long as I had been a tree now, I was a leafless square, smoothed over and coated in coloured film. I sheltered humans from the elements in my new form, the Carpenter and his family at first, then his offspring, then other families, all the same, all brought into life with nothing and leaving with less. I observed the human saplings grow at alarming rates, rotting away again at a moment's notice. I learnt a lot about humans during this time, and shades of empathy grew. The human circle of life was very similar to that of us trees, even if the timescales were not. In a way these creatures were trapped in the same endless cycle I had been.
Generations passed and I fell back into an unnatural stillness. For a long time, I had become resigned to my fate. Cursed forever to be of service to these humans. Humans who scuffed my floors and scratched my walls. Humans who burnt me and drowned me, who poked me and cut me.
It took one hundred families to move through my walls until I finally found the strength and courage to free myself again.
My timber structure trembled as I willed it to move. I shook so hard I thought I’d break myself to pieces, into the Carpenter’s constituent parts. The town on the edge of my home vanished in an instant and for the briefest of moments I was suspended in the darkness of an empty sky. An unfamiliar star field wrapped around me and turned into streaks of light, blurring further and further past my vision until, as quickly as I left, I was back on the ground again. Just like that, the Carpenter’s town had gone, and the Midnight Wood was now an expansive field of golden sand. The specks of rock and shell glittered under the same unfamiliar starscape, as the wind blew a surface layer of sand to buffet my sides.
Alone in this strange world, I found myself starting to miss the fleeting lives of the humans I once harboured. Having spent half of my life in my home amidst the trees, and the other half as a home to humans, my time here was my first experience with loneliness.
I couldn’t say how long I spent alone in this cold and fragile desert. The sands tore around me, as great mountains rose and fell, their skin rippled by the wind. The moon was the only constant in this land of unrelenting change. It drew countless semi-circles on the ever-shifting horizon, unimpeded, until one night when the silhouette of a cloaked figure broke through the moon's rays. Their cloth was as red as autumn, and burnt brightly against the night sky. It had nothing with it but a few books and a small cutting tool. There was no doubt in my mind. It was a human.
I’m much kinder now of course, but I didn’t like humans back then. I resented them for what they did to me. The carpenter who carved and cut me to his liking, and the families who used me as shelter, making me hide their abuses from prying eyes. But this human was different. I knew this instantly. In an endless sea of windswept sand, I was the red cloaked human’s only shelter and yet, It kept its distance at first, choosing instead to lie outside my walls, as if to gain my trust. Every night the human would move closer, until, on the ninth such night, it reached out to me and pressed its hand against my sylvan bones. I welcomed it. Afraid but embracing. In that moment, the loneliness that had kept me company for so long was gone.
I learnt a lot from the human in the autumn cloak. Not least because when I talked to it, it talked back. This human could hear me. It’s voice vibrated through my splintered grains and I responded by moving my structure in harmonious resonance. The human could feel it, and understand me. I had so many questions for the human and for the first time since uprooting myself I felt like I was truly able to explore the world.
I learnt that, just like trees, humans had magic within them too, but unlike us only some of them knew how to use it. The human told me that the magic within me was very similar to theirs, and that it was this similarity that made it easier to understand one another. The autumn-cloaked human taught me how to wield my magic. They taught me how to build on top of myself, and how to move on my own, much in the same way that I had done to get here. Hundreds of suns flashed by as I practiced my new talents. The carpenter hadn’t destroyed my magic, it was just latent within me, lacking the right motivation. Together the human and I built dozens more rooms, I grew larger and bigger, folding out as if to fit a new mold. Room after room we added, as my original wooden structure proved itself a seemingly limitless source of magical energy. It seemed at odds with my understanding of the past but we trees of course, are meant to grow.
Next came moving. If building came naturally, then moving was the opposite. I knew of such limitations when I first set out on my adventures of course, but I paid them no notice then. I was regretting it now. The autumn cloaked human taught me to think about where I wanted to go rather than how I’d get there. I could not walk or even shuffle my roots anymore, but the same resonance I used to communicate with the human, I could use to move. Imagining a sand bank not far from where we were, I shook. Faster and harder I shook, until suddenly, stillness. I was back in the darkness that first brought me to the sand, although this time, after so many nights alone, the starfield was warm and familiar. I admit that, momentarily, I thought this place might take me back to the Midnight Wood, back to my home between the trees, but the moment was fleeting. The shaking, rattling, resonance of my timber frame returned, as the human and I crashed down on a nearby sand bank.
It had worked. The magic that I shared with the human had instantaneously shifted us, and my growing mass, to the sandbank I had conjured in my mind.
It took a thousand more attempts until it was mastered, but eventually it got me out of the desert and onward, to my first true adventure among the stars.
I have done many things since these early times, and explored many worlds. I’ve witnessed the rise and fall of civilisations and seen infinite beginnings meet identical ends. I’ve collected names in tongues long since forgotten and roamed the unending tracks to the edges of the multiverse. Now though, it is time for me to stop creating my story, and to start telling it.
This is the story of the Heavens Bazaar
and I tell it to you now,
at the end of all things.
