The next several days followed the same routine as Zack would wake up, find a fresh change of clothes and a warm meal, and walk about the dwelling to the sitting room where he would awkwardly monologue to Lea with her offering a few basic replies.
One time, he vented in frustration. “Look, it’s clear to me that you’re trying to help. This food, I’m not sure what you put in it, but I feel so much better. My strength has returned.” He gestured to his lean, but no longer emaciated body, then let out a frustrated sigh. “But… I feel like a caged animal in here. I still don’t even know where I am, besides, Terin. I’m not sure if you view me as some sort of pet or what, but I can’t just stay like this forever. Every time we finish speaking, I just get so sleepy. Are you doing that? Is it in the food? It’s time to stop this.”
Lea had a strange expression and winced slightly when Zack insinuated that she was keeping him like some sort of animal. She responded in her strange accent with a simple, “Sorry.” She seemed to pick up everything he said without problem, but still didn’t really understand the language enough to reply back in detail. Simple one or two word responses were possible with her limited vocabulary. However, it was always awkward to hear her speak English.
Lea stood up from her chair and walked over to the wall in front of where the chairs and table were arranged in a half circle. She rested her palm against the wood and softly murmured something. Moments later, a bright blue glow covered a rectangular shape on the wall. The glow intensified to the point of being too bright to look at. Zack turned his head briefly, but then the light subsided. When Zack looked back, a large open window was in the wall in front of him, overlooking a scenic forest vista.
Zack wasn’t quite sure what hit him first, the beautiful view of a pristine forest, or the fresh smells of the morning dew mixed with the rich earthy scent of the soil and the crisp smell of the wide variety of trees. He stood up and walked over to Lea, captivated by the view before him.
“It’s beautiful.” Zack spoke softly, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath of fresh air.
Lea smiled at him. “Lea home. Not caged.” She spoke as she rested one hand on Zack’s shoulder and another on the window frame. It shone briefly in that bright blue light again before more of the wooden wall seemed to vanish in bright light, now forming a doorway.
Zack felt a warm glow as Lea touched him and reformed the wall before him. He jerked slightly, but quickly calmed. After spending so many days with Lea, he couldn’t be afraid of her forever. Some deep part of him still held a slight reservation against any form of mental manipulation, but the trust he had in Lea seemed to surpass those reservations. His eyes closed again as he focused on the warmth welling up inside of him. He thought he could actually feel the wood in front him change shape to Lea’s will. It was a strange, indescribable sensation. He felt as if the wood was alive. It didn’t feel wrong. It was just as if the living wood in front of him wanted form an arched door, so it simply did. It was the correct state of being for it at this moment in time.
“Wow…” Zack was speechless. He opened his eyes again and carefully set foot outside of the dwelling. His bare feet cool at the damp earth underneath. Lea let go of his shoulder and allowed him to take several paces forward as she followed silently behind him.
“This is your home? It’s beautiful.” He raised a hand to his forehead as he tilted his head back and looked to the rays of sun poking through the towering canopy at least 200 meters above him. The trees around him were absolutely massive, bigger than anything he had seen before on Earth.
When he turned around to look back at Lea, he expected to see some sort of rustic cabin behind her. Instead, there was a massive tree trunk easily double the size of any of the other trees in the forest. The bark was curled back around a hollow archway leading into the tree.
“Wait, we’ve been inside a tree this whole time?” Zack laughed to himself. “You know, it’s kind of funny. We have certain stereotypes of elves where I come from. It’s all fiction. But, I’m somehow not surprised you live inside a tree. Don’t tell me you’re actually as old as these trees too?” He chuckled, losing his senses of reality at the ridiculousness of his current situation.
Lea laughed along with Zack, shaking her head furiously. She seemed to pick up on some more of Zack’s earthly body language and mannerisms as she spent the past several weeks with him. “No.” She said, before furrowing her brow in frustration. She seemed to be thinking for the correct words but eventually just held out her hands for Zack. “Zack can’t understand. Language hard.” She looked up at him with pleading eyes. “Safe. Please?”
That was the most English he’d heard Lea speak to him since he’d met her. Zack could sense the frustration in Lea’s words and body language. He saw the tips of her ears, normally swept back and concealed by her long hair, poking out to the sides. As he spent time with her, he felt like he was starting to understand some of the “elven” mannerisms and body language. Still, he had a great deal of trepidation. It was clear what she was offering. She hadn’t attempted it again since the first time. She seemed to understand how it had affected him, and she was respectfully avoiding bringing those feelings back. However, he, too, was frustrated at the language barrier between them. She was the only other living being he had dealt with for weeks. The last person he spoke to before was… was… huh, that’s odd. He couldn’t remember. It feels like he had been living in solitude for decades.
“It is about time I put this fear behind me, I suppose. Lea, you’ve been nothing but kind to me. I’m a total stranger, yet you offered me your home, you took care of me, you nursed me back to health. I’m a stranger on this planet. There needs to be someone I can trust. I suppose that someone should be you.” He said, resolved, as he gently held hands with Lea.
“Thank you.” Lea spoke softly before reciting something in her native tongue. That same feeling washed over Zack again as his mind seemed to open up to some sort of external force.
“I don’t want you to be afraid of me. I’m so sorry about what happened before. I do not know your past. I can’t see your memories or know what you have experienced. The
Zack replied out loud with his spoken voice, “Yeah, I figured it might be something like that. I know you have no malicious intent. You’re being way too kind to me as it is. I guess we can talk like this. It’s easier than what we’ve been doing at least.”
Lea smiled up at Zack, “Well then, I should start by saying I am NOT as ‘old as the trees’, as you put it. We, that is, I guess you call us ‘elves’, have a tradition that after one of us has lived for twenty cycles, we will go out to live with nature until we feel ready to return to our family. For some, this can be as few as two or three cycles. For others, they may be out for fifty cycles or more. Every now and then, someone doesn’t come back, but usually they at least tell their family of their decision not to return.”
“This is my fourth cycle away from my family. But that doesn’t mean I’m old, okay?!” Lea’s thoughts come through with the mental impression that she was pouting. Zack thought to himself how women’s sensitivities about their ages must be a universal constant, regardless of what planet they were from.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean… in the stories we have, elves frequently have eternal beauty regardless of age. You are certainly the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. That, combined with that mystery of the unknown and the stories from my world. But, I guess, well, you know. Uh…” Zack stammered as he looked up at Lea to see her face turning several shades of red.
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After clearing his throat, he continued, “Uh, anyway, we don’t really measure time in ‘cycles’ where we come from. We call a year the time it takes our planet to revolve around the sun. It’s about 365 days. If this is truly another planet, I guess I’ll have to get used to the terms and your calendar here. But, by my time, I’m 28 years old. I’ll just consider you 24 years old I guess. Sorry for implying that you could have been centuries, that is, hundreds of years, old.”
Lea regained her composure somewhat, “That’s strange. The
“Oops, sorry. I’m not familiar with your culture or your ways. I’m just speaking from my heart. I’m a pretty straightforward guy. Sorry about that. I had some trouble catching the last bit of what you were saying. Well, thinking. Sending? Either way, things got hard to understand after awhile there. If it made you feel uncomfortable though, then I’m sorry.” Zack responded nervously.
“Anyway, you keep mentioning these things that are telling you about me and my language. I don’t quite understand though. It’s like, a buzzing in my head. I guess, is it some sort of higher being? An entity that you commune with? Nothing like that exists where I come from, but in fiction we call those spirits. Could it be something like that?” Zack continued. “Well, regardless, I think I might know a bit about why they can’t place my age. It’s actually pretty fragmented for me. For some reason I’m having trouble remembering it all, but I think I may have been asleep for a very, very, long time.”
Lea seemed lost in thought for a moment before replying, “It is a spirit, but at the same time it isn’t. It’s Terin, but it’s not Terin. It’s like how you feel the ground beneath you and the plants. And when they tell you things, or you ask them for things. I can’t really explain it.”
Zack and Lea continued for some time before retiring back into her home. Lea resized the door to a small window overlooking the forest before joining Zack on the chairs in the sitting room.
“There were others with you when you found me, weren’t there? How come I haven’t seen any of them? Are they living in other trees?” Zack asked inquisitively.
Lea reached out her hand and held his, once again establishing a shared connection between them. “There are other young people like me who are out here in the forest, but we are pretty spread out. The
“Oh, I see. It must be pretty lonely out here on your own for four years. Oh! And, do you even have a room? All I’ve seen is these two rooms. Don’t tell me I’ve been sleeping on your bed for the past several weeks?!”
Lea laughed softly and pointed to the ceiling. “I’ve been up there while you’ve been sleeping. It’s got a great view of the forest. Want to see?”
Zack had always had a fear of heights. He was frequently made fun of for it, as he was so tall. All his friends wondered why someone already six foot four inches would be so nervous about heights. He never understood their logic. It didn’t matter if he was over six feet tall or four feet tall. A fall was a fall. Though, holding hands with such a lovely lady seemed to instill a certain sense of confidence in him. “Yeah, lets take a look!” he exclaimed.
Lea blushed slightly. “I told you, they can’t read your memories. They don’t know your past. Your emotions though… they are clear to me. Um, if you’d like.
Zack just sat there and blinked a few times. Had he just inadvertently confessed? Moreover, were his feelings towards her even genuine? Was he just taken by the exoticness of an entire different species? Was he just mixing up his feelings of gratitude towards his savior and caretaker over these past few weeks?
“Zack?” Lea’s voice calling to him snapped him out of his internal conflict as he looked up and saw she had disappeared up the stairway without him. He rose and called back, “Don’t go too far ahead!”
The area above the room where they were sitting was solid wood. The stairs twisted and turned in a spiral leading up the trunk of the great tree. The passage was narrow, as if to not disturb too much of the tree’s internals. Only a few turns up, the light from the room below was entirely gone and Zack was left ascending in complete darkness. A few steps further and he bumped into something soft.
A loud squeak of surprise escaped Lea as she was inadvertently bumped into. “Ack! Sorry!” Zack’s voice exclaimed from right next to her as he blindly reached around and shuffled his feet. He seemed to be losing his balance on the narrow stairs before he grabbed hold of… something soft.
Zack felt a sharp stinging pain in his hand as he quickly let go of what he was holding onto and braced against the wooden passageway. “Hey, it’s too dark! I didn’t mean to… uh… “ He trailed off, realizing that no amount of words was going to settle this situation.
Lea whispered something in a soft murmur as motes of light circled around her body and covered it in a soft glow that illuminated the stairwell. She silently continued upwards without looking down at Zack or speaking to him.
Zack followed Lea wordlessly up the massive flight of stairs. The complete silence between the two of them made it insanely awkward and seemingly endless. From the outside, Zack wasn’t able to see the top of this particular tree, the canopy of all the smaller trees surrounding it blocking his full view. Those “Smaller” trees felt at least a couple hundred of meters though. He wasn’t sure if he had the endurance for the full climb.
After several more minutes, he asked, “Are we going all the way to the top?”
Lea just continued upwards with a quiet, “Yeah.” Her voice so subtle it could barely be heard.
After several more minutes of climbing in silence, they finally reached their destination as the stairs ended into a small platform and an arched doorway leading to the exterior of the tree. On the outside, a larger wooden platform circled the trunk and extended outward a dozen or so feet.
As Lea and Zack stepped into the cool midday sun, Zack had to shield his eyes for a moment while his pupils adjusted. He was above the canopy now and had a clear view of the sky. He looked up to the clear blue sky. It was the same familiar hue of sky as he remembered from Earth. At least that much had remained unchanged. Though, he could see a pale circle off in the distance. “So, you have the view of a moon in the daylight? That’s interesting. Where I come from, we rarely get to see it that clearly while it is light outside. Though it shines bright at night.”
Lea cocked her head at him, reminiscent of how she acted that first day he woke up. She seemed to be pausing to analyze the meanings behind his words and put them into her own language. It happened every now and then when he talked about concepts that were foreign to her or did not have a clear analogue on Terin.
Lea shrugged. Zack couldn’t recall ever having shrugged in front of her. He wondered if it meant the same thing as it did on Earth. There seemed to be a great deal of similarity between the elves on Terin and the humans on Earth. She started walking away towards the edge of the platform, and sat down, bare feet dangling over the edge.
Zack slowly walked to the edge and carefully sat down next to her, but some distance away. He looked out at the vast forest before him. It had to have spanned dozens if not hundreds of kilometers. It was hard exactly to tell with no accurate measure for how high up the platform they were resting on was. In the distance, he could see a break in the trees and a sprawling grassland beyond. There were no signs of modern structures or civilization. The untouched nature felt surreal to him.
As he was lost in the view, Lea scooted next to him and placed his hand over his. He didn’t even notice until the words entered his mind, “You use the word like ‘beautiful’ often. This is what is really beautiful though. We come here as we come of age, in order to remember our beginnings. This is the forest where the first of our kind was born. We’ve moved on from here, but we should never forget that this is where it started. This is also where our connection to Terin is strongest. The
Zack just sat in silence, not wanting his big mouth to ruin the moment. He listened as Lea continued, raising her arm to point at a slight gap in the canopy a couple kilometers out. “That’s where we found you. If you’d like, we can go there tomorrow. After that… I think it’s time for me to go home. Will you come with me?”
Zack smiled at Lea and replied, “I think I would like that. If you’ll have me.”