I had thought loneliness was something I knew how to live with.
I’d survived that great big lonely nothing that waited for me after death, after all. Or maybe it was everything en potentia? My ego had only died a little in the process either way, and all my survival had taken was the adoption of super healthy coping mechanisms like dissociating and talking to myself and narrating my every action through that lense!
Telling apart what I’ve said to myself aloud from what I’ve said in my head is hard unless I’m holding my hand against the back of my neck and waiting to see if I feel the vibration of my voice.
Anyway. What I don’t think I’d properly considered while binding myself to this world… this world that might be mine… is what having flesh would do to my ability to go without companionship for longer periods of time than any sane human should be subject to.
I won’t give myself a hard time about that one. I was fairly sure I wouldn’t last a moment more when I bound myself to this world. I was probably right, even. But it turns out that being an introvert, having memories where I spent centuries alternatively screaming at those who can never hear me and going without speaking entirely because I was surrounded by things that definitely could hear me, and suddenly having a cocktail of chemicals buzzing about my brain-pan I hadn’t been subject to since my death? Yeah they don’t go well together. They especially don’t do much to stop me from craving something as simple as having someone to talk with.
It’s all making me a bit snarkier than I should be. Or maybe I just didn’t remember how snarky I really was before now.
My flesh still thrummed and hummed with some sort of power I could not place. It had grown quieter day after day, but it wasn’t going anywhere. It wasn’t losing its strength. That much I could tell. It was just getting quieter like a lamp grows dimmer when a lid is pulled across its mouth.
It all made me feel much too restless. My days were blurring together, now, because I’d woken somewhere so obviously perfect for my goals I simply refused to abandon it until I’d made a home for myself here.
For all that I had been calling this place a plain I wasn’t sure that was true. It was more of a giant clearing in the woods, one separated from an even deeper forest only by an always raging river that I could find neither end of.
When I waded into that river to fish with a makeshift spear, loamy soil squished between my toes, I sometimes felt like it was about to sweep me away. I most certainly couldn’t cross it. If I tried swimming across the river I was sure it would kill me before I’d gotten halfway across it.
Sometimes I didn’t even feel safe standing by the river. When clouds had darkened the sky and rain threatened to make the river flood everything around it, how could I? When I’d spent so many days fishing that I felt my mind wander and my hands waver, why would I risk a tragic fall into routine?
So some days I would walk into the woods. I would gather berries and pick fruit and pointedly ignore every mushroom I could find. Then I would look again because my pickings were slim and my standards much too high with twenty thousand years of agriculture working to raise my standards too high.
Hunt. Gather. Bang rock against tree and drag to flat-ish ground relatively high up. Draw lines in the dirt. Return to my tree…
My tree was something special. Its bark was pure white and as blinding as snow. Its trunk must have stretched higher than a bus, and it was thicker to boot. It bore no fruit and no leaves. A bioluminescent blue sap sometimes flared to life in between cracks in its bark. It glowed brilliant as lightning - there for a moment, and then it was gone.
This tree was my closest thing to a home until my best attempts at fashioning, at bare minimum, a shack I could line with mud bore fruit.
Hah. Fruit. I wonder what my tree’s fruit would look like? If it’s a lonesome tree in a garden I intend on making into an eden, an apple, surely. Or maybe something I have no name for.
That was too grand a dream though. It was more a delusion I held onto as I ate at the tree’s base and dug holes by its roots to fill with my waste. My actual plans sounded far less megalomaniacal. In a hollow high up in my tree’s branches, besides where I climbed every night when I went looking for a place far from the ground to sleep, I had made a treasure trove of seeds and plant clippings, bound together by thick, broad leaves and long, thin grasses in the hopes I could use them to grow crops. By night I would slip into that hollow and drift to sleep to the fading echoes of distant songs, looking out at distant mountains and admiring a starry night sky which I had never once seen in life. My prior life, at least.
That was it. That was my day, in and out, as I slowly wandered about and struggled to survive and to defeat my boredom.
All I could ever have asked for was someone to talk to. To share my woes, to listen to my nonsensical songs, all those simplest and most basic of human desires so deeply inherent to being human that not even an eternity of being dead could get rid of them. A friend, a lover, and something fluffy to pet that I perhaps shouldn’t.
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The morning that would change all of that was cold and dreary in a way that I was not prepared for.
The grass crunched in a disgusting way beneath my heels. Every other step left me jolting or wincing as I stepped on something that felt unnecessarily, unfortunately sharp. The ground was less loamy soil than it was slimy mud. The wind was cold and piercing in a way that left all the hair on my still-naked body standing up.
My only saving grace was that this wasn’t some sign of the coming winter. When the wind wasn’t trying to gnaw my flesh off, it was a downright pleasant - if wet - day. But a storm was brewing. Clouds, heavy and pregnant, were building on the horizon opposite the mountain range and consumed my sight whenever I looked… whatever direction the mountains were in. I would say it was blowing in from across the river but I would have to possess even a thimble of confidence that I could tell where the clouds actually were relative to me for that.
That storm set me into a panicked little flurry. I hadn’t made any shelter. I’d had a hard enough time dragging about and chopping down tiny little trees that I thought might make for a good tent, much less finding something that I thought might help me make shitty little shoes or clothes. I’d had no success, to be frank.
My first thought was that I should imitate a trapdoor spider and make a sort of door - but more likely just a slab of branches and leaves and whatever I could slap together - to hold against the hollow in my tree. The one where I’d been storing all my seeds and sometimes slept in. It was big enough to hold me, and relatively sheltered from the wind - that was why I’d been storing everything in there in the first place.
My measure of time has always been the only thing looser than my sense of direction, and that was when I had accurate timekeeping devices always within arms reach. Without them around I only know that I spent too long trying dumb nonsense before abandoning all of that and resolving to gather up everything I thought I might need, running into the woods, and finding shelter sturdier than a tree under the prevailing logic that maybe trying to find shelter from a storm by staying inside of the sole tree in a gigantic clearing was probably a bad idea actually.
If my tree wasn’t regularly struck by lightning then I’d eat the first hat I made.
I’d bumbled my way into a good plan. I’d hopefully manage to bumble my way into finding a cave or a particularly big foxhole. Yet all it took was one look at the titanic thing waiting for me beneath my tree to make that entire plan worthless.
It was impossible to miss them the moment I began to walk back to my tree. They were positively massive even with their obviously hunched back. Their body itself was hidden by a cloak of mud and brittle branches. They looked more like someone had dressed a caterpillar up in a spider’s web and rolled it about by a dying tree’s roots than a person. It didn’t even possess a face, just a dark, gnarled hollow where a face ought to be. Forcing their way out of that hollow were two chipped, cracked antlers, split at their every end like a bone sucked dry of their marrow and looking for all the world like somebody had jammed together the shed antlers of every deer that had ever lived and died.
My heart skipped a beat. It made up for it by moving twice as fast as I approached the figure looking down at me - not because of some air of condescension it carried, but because it was so tall that it could only look at me by turning its head towards its feet. The smell of sap mingled with the ozone in the air as I stood as close as I dared to to the monstrosity that must have been waiting for me and called out “Hello?” as gently as I could.
“I have been watching you for some time now, child. You’re quite the curious one.” The voice that came out of the hollow is surprisingly gentle. It is deep, yes - deep enough that it didn’t startle me. But it is an obviously feminine voice nonetheless, its firmness making the towering thing lowering itself so that its head was just above my own instead of looming above it seem more motherly than intimidating. “Tell me. What have you been trying to accomplish? Why do you draw lines in the dirt? Where did you come from, little one?”
“No, I mean… Hello as in hi? Who are you? It’s nice to meet you?!?” I blushed in embarrassment and corrected her. Her? Yes, that seems correct.
The tree-woman was taken aback in a very literal way. I could see her whole body pause, her back lifting just a bit, as she considered my malformed question. “Ah. In that case… yes, child. Hello.” She finally acknowledges with a slight tilt of her head a faint lilt of amusement her voice. It was a strikingly cute gesture. So much so that it got my feet moving again. I began to pace around the woman, looking her up and down as she rose back up to her fully hunched height to regard me with obvious amusement. I imagine my eyes must have been sparkling.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“Look at you! You’re… you’re…” I gestured at her everything as the proper words failed to find their way into my mouth. “So cool.” I finished with an awed whisper.
“I’m what?” If the woman could frown in confusion she would be.
“Cool. Awesome. Incredible. How nightmarish, how primordial, how inspiring-!” My voice felt a little shrill at that moment. That one moment where I realized that this world was a slight bit bigger than what I thought it was and the already weak barrier between my head and my mouth broke like a dam. “I thought I’d seen all this world had to offer, knew the limits of what was and was not, but you… you are something I would make. How terrifying.” I paled only a little at that realization.
I was shaking with too much excitement for the thought of some horrible monster to get me down for long, after all.
“I believe you have only further confused me, child. And you haven’t even answered any of my questions yet…” She chuckled. “I wanted to know what drew you to these lands.” The woman continued with a bow of her head. The smell of sap grew stronger. Intoxicatingly so.
“You can call me the farmer. That seems appropriate enough for what I’m doing.” I gazed out at the fields and nearly fell flat on my face when I tried to lean on a walking stick that wasn’t in my hands. “What I want to do.” I corrected myself as I tried to stand up straight.
It was hard when the scent of sap was growing so strong. It wasn’t even… It wasn’t even a properly sappy smell. Not just because it was mixing with the feeling that only ever comes over a person before a storm breaks, but because the scent felt otherworldly. Like the sap’s smell alone could knock me over and kill me if it liked me a little bit less.
“You refuse to give me a name beyond a title?” The woman tilts her head.
“You strike me as… much too Fae-ish to trust with my even a portion of my name.” I glanced up at the woman. It was the best idea I had of what she might be, beyond a nascent god, and I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I couldn’t give any more of my name to the Fae than I already had. I wouldn’t.
My head ached. I wasn’t even sure whether I was remembering this moment and describing it to somebody else or living it any more.
“The Fae tread here no more. They visited, laughed at us, and left when the seas were yet to calm long before you were born.” The words sounded like the woman had chewed up curdled milk and was trying her best to spit it out. A grudge, clear as day, that she still held like it was fresh.
Fascinating. So the Fae had visited this place and left? They had seen everything you had and been disappointed, no doubt. There was no history here. No depth. No tales to listen to and feed upon. But if Fae had visited, and this woman had met them…
“But Names still have power, no?” I called the woman out on her half-truth. She didn’t answer. She merely grumbled to herself instead. I lower your head and keep my back turned to her as you look out across the fields. She’d clearly learnt something from the Fae’s brief visit. “Thought so. So I won’t give you a name. Not my name, or my other name, or even the one I openly use in secret. I’ve paid my price to keep them.”
“Then you may call me the Woods-Mother, as all my children do.” She reciprocated.
“You aren’t my mother. I didn’t think this world had mothers.” I shut my eyes with a frown.
“It most certainly does, and I was not being literal.”
“Ah. Whoops. My bad?”
“You are forgiven. You are a flighty thing, aren’t you? Now… you mentioned what you had se-” I interrupted her question by raising my hand. “Yes?” The Woods-Mother responds automatically and before she even realizes what she’s done.
“We’ve glanced past this already, but what are you? I thought I’d glimpsed everything there was to know about this world. I saw nothing but Monstergirls inhibiting an untamed world, and a few nascent godlings who had similar forms. I thought this was a depthless, empty world, full only of women fated to lose to dick and lacking the concept of what they craved.”
“A nascent what?,” The Woods-mother latched onto one particular phrase. I grew silent, not quite willing to introduce religion for all I was willing to be candid about my origins. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been bandying it about in my head so freely. “Perhaps… we should both back up, child. Before we keep confusing one another. I am trying my best to be patient and understanding with you. I have not done so in much too long. But the more I try to do so the more insane you sound.”
“Okay mom.” I roll my eyes.
“Do not call me that. I gave you a title. Show me at least a little respect if you expect me to continue giving you any of mine, child.” She snapped at me.
“Then don’t call me child. I’m older than you!” I snapped back.
“That is unlikely. But I don’t feel like engaging you in your childish games, ‘Farmer’, so tell me this. What does your title mean? Why have you so stubbornly stuck to your obtuse path? Where did you even come from, you strange and lonely little thing?” The Woods-Mother glided up to my side, staring down at me now, all her past attempts at lowering herself while she spoke to me forgotten as our discussion grew… heated.
“I’d really like to know what your title means first. I have so many questions for you, Woods-Mother, and I suspect they’re the same as yours are for me.”
“You are asking for quite a lot for one so rude as to constantly interrupt me and snub me by refusing to share your name in good faith.”
“One day I’ll tell you my name. And you’ll tell me yours. That’s what I hope, anyway. I get that you might not like that, but… again. I don’t even understand who or what you are. You think much the same of me. So I promise that on the day we trust one another, we shall both tell one another our names. “ I huffed. “Is that okay?”
The Woods-Mother stopped and thought about that deal. She stared at the distant storm. She stared at the distant mountains. “It is agreeable.” She finally admitted.
“Then please. Ladies first.” I gave her a proper little bow. The mockery is not lost on her, even if the precise meaning is.
“I am the Woods-Mother. I am the flesh of the land. I am everything that lives and breaths within these woods, from birth to death, and every sensation therein… no matter how easily they all blur together. This is my body as much as the tree beneath which you sleep. I am every leaf, every eye, and every breath. And I also think….” The Woods-Mother pauses. Her words were smooth and roiling as the distant clouds, coming slowly from her mouth in a manner that mad them as immovable as they were understandable. “Mhm.” It has been much too long since I attempted to give myself a grandiose introduction. It is only practice that prevented me from further mangling my epitaphs…”
While she muttered to herself I frowned and looked closer at the Woods-Mother. At how, beneath all the dirt and grime, all her bark was quite white. Then I let my gaze naturally follow itself to all the holes I had dug and then buried after filling them, all across the land which the Woods-Mothers roots must spread, and realized why she might have been so cross as to try talking to me in the first place. “Oh. Have I been…. I planned on making a proper bathroom later but - uh- should i? Stop? Y’know? Stop… I don’t even know how to feel about this.” You burn a distinct crimson now.
“You are fine to continue respecting the land as you have. If I were to find feces disgusting I’d have already depopulated these woods. You are flesh and blood - it is only natural. It is hardly as though you have literally shat upon me in any manner worth discussing.” the Woods-Mother chuckled. “Now. Do not try to worm your way from sharing more about yourself”
“I suppose it is overdue,” I chuckled. “I am a Farmer. It’s a simple title based on my own simplified understanding of what a Farmer does back home. They manage and breed animals. They sculpt the land. They grow and cultivate plants. But I’ve decided I ought to do those things because this is a very simple world. I’ve apparently missed some things, but I know - without a shadow of a doubt - that this world would be dead without me.
It’s not just that this world might have gone pop at any moment without me. It’s that the world I saw was one that shouldn’t be questioned too deeply, one with a false history and a recent birth. The fae likely told you as much. Nothing is sustainable unless I change that. I am a man, and I know you might not understand what that is -”
“I know what a man is.” The Woods-Mother interrupted me.
“I… what?” I blinked.
“You are the first of my children to be one, that is true. But I don’t wish to shock you with the revelation that I have seen more animals mate than you have seen days” she chuckled.
“Right, right. Of course.” I nodded. “I expected myself to be more of an outside context problem than this…” I glumly admit.
“Are you that disappointed to be understood?”
“A bit. But oh well. I understand what you are now, Woods-Mother. But what do you truly want to know about me? We have made a vow about our names, but I’ve plenty I’m willing to share.” I waved away her hurtfully accurate commentary, sitting cross-legged in the grass so I could glumly rest my elbow on my knees and my cheek on my fist.
“I think I understand you well enough, child. But I have been terribly curious. Those lines you draw in the dirt, usually without thinking…. What are they?” The Woods-Mother gestures for the first time. A hand emerges from her cloak, decrepit and moth-eaten, and points . I follow it and nod.
“It’s my plan for what I want to put where. I don’t have any paper, or papyrus, or whatever - but I have a stick and there’s plenty of dirt.”My head bobs as I follow a train of thought that only I could make at all.
“Your plan?”
“Yeah. Like - over there? By where I’ve been stacking up what I wood I can gather?” You gesture towards a barely-visible brown lump in the far off distance. “I’ve erased the lines plenty of times but I do intend on making a wood cabin there. And I’m not sure what sort of Monstergirls live in this world. I’ve seen Harpies flying up above, so I've considered what to make them. A chicken coop seems much too degrading, but if they're into it, I guess it would work. I think I much prefer making that sort of dove tower thing people used to make. Something that lets them land and nest and maybe come down and walk about like people. But I don't know enough about them yet." The words tumbled out of my mouth. I bounced in place, eager to perhaps give the Woods-Mother a tour, but I’ve heard wolves howling and felt a certainty that it’s much too human to be actual wolves. But I know how much space, say, a grain silo takes up. I understand that I’ll need lots.. And lots… of space for crops.”
“This is not enough space to grow things?” The Woods-Mother's voice grows harsher. She gestured at the great, immense, plains all about you, at the woods and more."
“Not for agriculture, no. Not for sustainable food. This land is plenty arable. It’s flat and workable. I don’t intend to destroy everything. I’m no Capitalist. I am the steward of this world now, I think, as much as I have declared myself a farmer. I refuse to destroy nature itself. But I absolutely have to carve out a home for myself… and for everyone who I want to save… when and where I can. And these are some very big woods.” I shook my head in disagreement.
“How foolish.”
“Oh?”
“You think nature is a thing that can simply be twisted to your ends? I already knew you were preparing yourself for pain and suffering, child, but this is not a battle you can win.”
“You think so? You truly know so?”
“I do. And I see no point in arguing with you about it when you are so obviously prepared to be more stubborn than a centaur about it.” she snorts. “I was prepared to say a few things to you. You have thrown me off course further than I could've expected."
“That’s fine. You did the same to me. Just two people unprepared for conversation, that’s us!” I clap my hands together and laugh.
“Leave me be for now. When you return I promise you that you’ll have shelter from Typhon and the coming storm. I am in a foul mood, now, and I am in no hurry to continue our conversation."
“You’re this grumpy… you think I'm insane already… just based on the rough outline of what I intend on doing?” I considered. Then, very quickly, I began walking away. “Very well, Woods-Mother. Thank you. Thank you, and I hope that I might prove you wrong.” The ground rumbles as I let out a totally sane little giggle, quickly scrambling to my feet and calmly walking away from the fuming dryad behind me.