The Withering

It was once strong.

Long ago, it, or shall I say they, stood tall and enormous, casting great shadows over the southern landscape. It ruled over the land, and joined with it as one. The land itself was forest, from the darkened wet forest in the southeast, to the high forest hills with great tall trees in the northwest. From where the forest was dense and full of critters, to the almost lifeless forest that had its trees climb the steep rise of a great volcano. The land was a forest, and the forest was it.

It saw nothing, for there was nothing to see. It could feel shadows of critters dancing under its many leaves, circling around its many trunks. Some shadows were small, rare, so lonely and insignificant when compared to the enormous unity that was It. Some others were taller, numerous, and did not dance around the same way the other shadows did. Yet, while studying the shadows’ pattern of dancing carefully, it did not alter itself, nor did it care to act or interfere with the shadow’s dancing in any way.

And then, one day, the shadows began dancing much differently. They came together, joined each other close in their dancing. More shadows came, arriving from the West and the North. The many shadows greeted each other, furiously dancing closer and closer, until in a split second the shadows started devouring each other. Two shadows came together, danced, and one remained. Over and over the shadows devoured each other, each time more ferociously. It could see the shadows growing stronger, fiercer, altering rocks and metals and the bodily tissues of other shadows to grow their dancing stronger and more brutal. It has never felt such ferocity in the dancing of the shadows, never such heat and wrath in the shadows’ footsteps upon the soil above It’s roots.

And then the shadows turned to It for power. They cut down the trunks of It to make fortified structures, tools, and weapons. Then the shadows extracted the sap from within the trees, drinking it to grow themselves healthier and stronger, hardening it to cover themselves with outfits out of It’s own blood. It could not respond. Never has anything so terrible and awe inspiring happened to the forest. It could not dance like the shadows, it could not see or speak or hear or touch like the shadows. To think and to feel were its only available actions, but neither could slow down the shadows’ rampaging dances. So It stood, and it felt, and it withered.

First the trees in the north were gone, then east and west, then in the center of the forest. The forest withered and withered until only the trees in the south were left; many, in the lands where the forest is dark and wet, less in the other side of the southern water, where the land was drier and warmer. There, it stood, and many of its trees. Yet the shadows were soon to come. They cut, and chopped, and slew in the dry land until the entire land was no more a forest. Only one hill remained, and there it stood, with but a single tree atop the hill. It knew the shadows were coming, hungry, yet it knew the single tree could not be helped. No alteration, no sympathy, no feeling or thought could help it.

So the alterations stopped, slowly, and the sympathies withdrew, and the thoughts and feelings grew weaker and more silent. Minute by minute, hour by hour, the tree felt weaker, more withered, more exiled.

And then it was alone. It could not feel its wet roots in the southeastern soil, could not feel the tiny shadows there dancing merrily and safely round its trunk. It was lonely, afraid, withering, shriveling. It could not sustain so many leaves and such a tall trunk, so it altered itself smaller, smaller. It shed its bark, dried its sap, withdrew its leaves.

When the shadow came it was a white, shriveling tree, 5 feet high. It felt the shadow come closer, run its hand on its tiny shriveled branches, It was ready to die. It dried its sap to a deadly solid, shed its leaves completely, making it so the death would be easy and without pain.

The shadow picked up its metallic tool. And then the shadow left.

So there stood the Hist, withered, cold and dying, in the heat of the once beautiful wasteland.

It remembered nothing, did nothing, felt nothing. And then, under the scorching sun, it withered away, and became nothing.