The Forest For the Trees

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Seed didn’t really like idea of fighting something. A beetle made of fire eating the trees, his swarm swelling out behind him like a cape… He liked the idea of fighting that even less.
”So,” He cleared his throat and asked, ”Where is he?”

”On the outer edge of the world” “The outer edge” “The edge” The trees rustled between them. Seed sighed and deadpanned. Ultimately, that was pretty vague – he wasn’t even sure if the Forest had an edge: it always seemed, to him, to loop back in on all its little private worlds, its secret folded self… But there didn’t seem to be an edge.
”…More specificaaallly?”
”Follow. We will guide you.”

The branches in the canopy rustled, raining green leaves down onto the ground. They fell around Seed like snow as he walked forward, each tree carrying a signal for the next one on the path to shake. It seemed a very long way from his home to where the beast prowled, and he went further into -- or out of -- the forest, until he was not sure he knew his way back. Well, I suppose the way back is forward, he mused as he stared over the landscape, all newer growth here, all underbrush and gaps of bright light that was alien relative to the deeper woods where the deer dwelled.
Seed moved without worry through the underbrush, his legs and the brambles just passing through each-other, with the soft string sound of the forest’s magic. Seed wasn’t sure he could grasp the idea of things always being solid, all the things, all the time…Or perhaps it was him that wasn’t solid all the time, or both. The blue dust that rose up from the bushes as he went ascending long after the sound had stop, leading his eye up through the thinning canopy…

Where it fused with the column of smoke.
”We have arrived.” The trees said as one, the chorus echoing it a few times. The sound came to him with the smell of burning, and the whirr of distant beetle wings, becoming less distant by the distance.
”Well,” he said, his nerves twanging. ”I’m off.”
”We can’t speak to you there.” ”We can’t speak to you.” ”We can’t speak.”
He was not sure he wanted an answer to the question that raised…But as he entered the land where the treetops were coated with smoke, as the life and green fell away… He found the answer.

The branches of the pines were blackened and withered away, the earth was cracked and grey with the blazing heat and the clouds of white ash that moved through the air. Raw stumps jutted from the ground in broken, worn-down displays, the trees lying as devoured husks, little more than sawdust, by their sides. And the ones that stood…We alive with jewels. Black and brown and husky gold, glittering and scintillating crammed onto every surface. It created a magic-eye illusion as the space between each beetle clinging to the trees resolved itself into yet another beetle. And each macerated the wood to a soft pulp and taking the sap from it like vampires, until everything was dead and rotting.

Seed walked along them wall-eyed. He had had nightmares that didn’t measure to this, to the scent of fire and rot and the utter silence, as he was left – completely and wholly in a way he had never known – alone with himself. He had never even noticed how much the ambient sound of the forest had always been with him, insulating him from this world. He would have said, from his days as a tree growing where no other tree could reach him, from his days when it felt like all his friends were gone and his lovers left him, that he knew loneliness. But this: they weren’t even here. No one was here but the maddening clicking of the beetles. It sucked at his heart as a black hole.

This was just a waste, growing and growing each day. Sweat dripped from his brow. He took another step forward.
And then all the beetles, never moving from their spots, began to click their mandibles together. The sound rattled Seed’s teeth, and drowned out the trundling sound that drove at him from the side…
Until the earth beneath him was tipped up in a great sheet, driven from under his hooves by a single massive dig of a barbed horn as long as his body. As it flung him back and onto the ground, he saw it.

It was a massive beetle, dwarfing the deer before it, neither stag nor elm but something in-between, pulsing with magic like smoke. Its face was all serrated mandibles and single horn with its schimitar-like curve seeming to form it to a blade. Bits of burnt earth cracked off the horn as it reared up. The heat blistered the air along its great back, red as wine, dulled with scorched ash and charcoal streaks. At the tip of each articulated leg was a plume of fire that dwindled a trail of blaze behind it. Its underbelly was coated in the swarm, riding its magic. It lowered itself, its foremost legs crashing and shaking the ground again as Seed looked on…So that it could look over its horn at him, and meet his golden eyes with the black beads, tinged with madness.

This was, Seed knew in his bones, the place where someone…Someone heroic like his old and largely lost friends, Dag and Virgil, someone tough like Walter, or someone who seemed bold and true and could stand with his unbowed shape against the horizon, sunlight radiating around him like a living piece of poetry…. Would stand up straight, rise to his hind hooves, and with the heat of the breath of war on his ragged breath, say something powerful. Say something brave and intense, before plunging into battle with certain doom. If he could say it now, he could be someone like that: someone so much more beautiful and real than he was (someone, said the secret voice in his heart, that no one would leave for not being enough). All he had to do was stand his ground, even as the smoke corroded in his nostrils. And then, just once, when someone really needed him, he could be a hero. He could be better.

Knowing this, wanting this…Why was it, then, that his body forced him to run? He didn’t know. By the time he realized it, he was bolting past, as the monster swung its horn crashing through the trees, sending up a wave of flame, beetles, and sawdust that ignited in the air. The little drops of flame landed on Seed’s back half-burnt. He bucked as he ran, his heart pounding in his ears loud enough to drown out a singular and monstrous roar.

It wasn’t loud enough to drown out anything else, and when he at last stopped, at a live and more familiar edge of the forest, his head hung low.

”I-I couldn’t…I didn’t…I’m not…” He muttered, trying to place together in his own head the exact configuration of words that would let him catch the shame and show it to himself.
His back stung. He wasn’t used to pain very much – it hurt. As he breathed, the small burns made him wince.
”Don’t despair, honey. Come see me.” The rustle – the rustle of a singular tree, greater and wider than them all, mellifluous with smooth age, reached out to him across the forest. It was a voice he knew well – it had a bit of an old hickory twang to it, and a magnolia softness, but the age and the power to it was oak to its core. ”We’ll fix you right up.”