Nevanthi often spent her days lulled into a deep, deep slumber.

Her body stretched so far now. Its roots stretched far and wide beneath an empty plain that was once full of her brothers and sisters, not half so blessed as her. Her empty white boughs stretched towards the clouds and danced, unconquered, through the most tempestuous gales.

She’d had a body once. She'd had eyes, and hands, and maybe even a face. She'd danced with her feet and sung with her voice before she’d outlived the first to make their songs and carve their flutes and bang their feet with her.

She grew and those things she’d enjoyed had grown with her. Grown to be about her, dedicated themselves her, become a way for the flora and fauna to lull their mother to sleep. Nevanthi’s body might have remained firm and supple, but time had proven her temper was brittle.

So she let herself be soothed so, so long ago she could not remember it. She let whatever shape she’d had then sink into the mud at the base of her trunk and rot among the carcasses of her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Now her veins were the rivers and lakes and underground springs spiraling through the plains that only she remained in. Her eyes and ears and tongue were everything that still lived. Her skin was the grass and the flowers and the mold slowly growing atop the dead. Her hands were the trees joined to her by her roots and her flesh was the fungi connecting all else.

Not even the songs that once lulled her to sleep roused her now. They barely even pulled at her heartstrings. The newer songs, the newer traditions - even those dedicated to her or made at her demand - barely registered to Nevanthi.

Life moved on. Nature persisted, unconquerable and as permanent as the seasons. Meaningful change happened more slowly than a glacier. There was so much that was always happening, but it was always…

The same. Generation after generation after generation...

So Nevanthi slept.

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Waiting

“I should not be catching this many fish…”

Waiting…

“I mean. I’ve never gone fishing before, much less tried imitating a bear, but-”

…waiting… ?

“God. I didn’t think I’d be this lonely.”

Something new walked through Nevanthi’s woods. Ate of her flesh and slept beneath her boughs. It dug a pit to shit in by her roots and another to spark a fire in and cook its meals above.

She was not quite sure what it was. It was male, very obviously, but… how had she not noticed it?

“Long, long agooooo~”

Nevanthi watched the strange man. She listened to him sing.

“I learned to sing when no one could hear! Where none could see!”

She listened to his lonely, quiet ramblings.

“That I am free~ Free to be me!”

But mostly, she watched, and felt fascination. She watched them dig long lines in the dirt and try to hack at the youngest trees on the outskirts of the woods with a rock they’d bashed against another rock until they had a sharp enough tool to try and bring them down.

“...I should stick to poems."

For weeks she watched him. Digging holes and then filling them once they’d been filled with his waste and what he could not eat before it began to rot. She cradled him when he climbed into her bough and listened as he quietly hummed along when the Wolves began to howl their song. She slept alongside him until he stirred in the morning as the distant hymns of the Satyrs rolled across the land from mountains high. Through it all she watched with ravenous attention as her first son tried his best to make for himself shelter and weapons, for unlike all his sisters, this new child of hers had neither natural gifts nor notable traits with which to defend himself besides his odd gender.

The part of Nevanthi which had been growing more awake quietly marked him as not the brightest and resolved to never tell him that.

“Shouldn’t I have met… anyone… by now?”

So one day, naturally, she felt the least she could do for the newest and most wayward of her children was thank him for the respect he had paid nature by letting him know he was not as alone as he feared. It had been much too long since she herself had talked with one of her children, after all.

"Maybe Dad was right about our singing voices..."

Nevanthi would soon consider this the second-worst choice she’d ever make.