I feel the warmth of sunlight just before dawn. The sky is dark but I feel light on my leaves. I am confused, at least until she touches down on the grass not far from the edge of my overhanging branches.
I keep telling myself it can’t be her. That she died centuries ago.
But it was her.
I am happy to see her, but I wonder why she had been gone for so long. She speaks, and not to the moon. She speaks to me. I do not understand but she smiles in the half-darkness and steps closer. Her smile grows dry as she takes another step forward and presses a hoof to my trunk. I can feel her reach out with her roots. She senses the rot in me, but she doesn’t stop and walk away.
She presses deeper until I am certain she can feel every branch and knot, and knows the extent of every living fiber of my sapwood, and where it meets the decay.
Though she has not grown ugly on the outside, I can sense something in her as well. I remember that she had been burned inside, just like me, but she is not full of rot and worms. She is simply… hollow. I know how deep her glowing smile reaches, and the extent of her white fur and flowing mane. The emptiness inside her aches like the rot inside of me.
Like me, she has watched the world change around her. And that change has always been according to its nature. The old die, and the young grow in their place. But not us.
She pulls her hoof back and looks up at me. I can see something in her eyes that I didn’t understand before. A spark that burns from deeper than her smile, and deeper even than her hollow heart. She smiles again, but not a smile I’ve seen before. This smile is sad but warm, smoldering with that deep spark.
Her horn lights up and she lifts the saddlebag from her back. With a deep breath, she turns to face the east and lights her horn again. As the rising sun paints the sky with a blossom of red, I see in the growing light that her bag is full of tools.
A blade, a hammer, a chisel.
An axe.
In the full light of day, she lifts the axe in her magic and circles me slowly, looking my trunk up and down. She steps forward and rubs her hoof across my bark before nodding to herself. Slowly, her magic fades and the axe lowers until she can bite down on the handle.
She raises the axe.