She came back again, just before dawn. Just like yesterday. I hadn't expected to see her again so soon, but here she is. She still wears her mask. She brought different tools this time, and still refuses to use her horn to hold them. The tools are smaller, and I can feel her scraping away a thin layer of the living wood along with the rot. She is removing the last traces of my decaying heartwood, and making sure nothing infected with fungus remains.
There is a lot of living wood that comes away with each scrape of her tools. This is piled with the rot upon another little bonfire on the grass outside. Now I know what the castle town smelled like as it burned. She carves stairs into my sides and digs deep into my roots, and climbs to the highest reaches of my trunk. Every second of this work is excruciating. Yet she does not pull back her roots. Her hooves stay on my wood, and she feels everything that I feel.
She works into the night again. I wonder if she will be back tomorrow, again.