Between Light and Branch

Photo from Tina Crossgrove collection

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The scent of warm honey dissolving on stone arrived on the mist. The air thickened with it. Leaves trembled. Even the ancient moss on my bones begins to stir.

I have waited three hundred years for a sign that I am not alone. I have counted the seasons by the depth of silence they bring. I have memorized the particular loneliness of being needed yet unseen. A guardian of the forest.

Then she arrived.

Her butterfly found me first, her soul memory. A creature with wings the color of candlelight. It landed on what was once my ribs. Now mere calcium and memory.

She appeared between the twin cedars. The ancient trees lean toward her.

She is not fully of our world. The evening light passed through her rather than upon her. Her footsteps fell silent upon the forest floor. She is memory fae. A being between heartbeats.

When she sees me, she stops.

I wait for the scream. I have grown accustomed to screams. They are the familiar shape of fear. But she makes no sound.

Instead, she tilts her head and her eyes meet the hollow sockets where my eyes once were. Somehow, she sees ME. “You've been waiting,” she says. Her voice is starlight on leaves. “I felt you waiting.”

My skeletal hand rises without permission. I cannot speak. My voice left me in a century so distant I've forgotten its number. The trees took my words and gave me their language. The creak of ancient wood.

Yet she understands.

She steps closer. She radites the cold glow of moonlight. Starfall on skin. My bones ache with it. They remember what it felt like to have blood moving through them, to have a body that felt things beyond the pull of earth.

“Don't,” she whispers. “Don't be afraid of me.”

I have never been afraid of anything since I became this. Fear requires hope. Hope requires the possibility of loss. But looking at her—really looking, if a skeleton can be said to look—I feel something crack open inside my ribcage. Something I believed calcified centuries ago.

A butterfly lands on her shoulder. Then another. Within moments, the air around us is alive with them. Golden wings flutter, clustered around her as if drawn to some frequency only they can perceive. She giggled. Purely joyful. It reverberates in my ancient bones. The memory of joy surrounds me.

"They're beautiful," she breathes. "Are they yours?"

No. They are attracted to the magic you give this place. I cannot say this aloud, instead I will my tree branches to move. The ancient cedar beside us bends its lowest limb toward her. An invitation. She reaches up. When her fingertips touch the bark, I feel it like a caress against my own skeleton. The sensation travels through root-systems and deep earth, through the network of my being, and settles somewhere in the hollow of my chest that used to embrace a heart.

"You're cold," she says, surprised. "I thought you would be warm."

I am old. I am guardian. I am cold because I have held myself apart. I am cold because the only heat I've known for three centuries is the slow burning of my own grief.

When she stands beside me, close enough that the hem of her dress woven from moonlight and spider silk, brushes against my leg, the cold begins to crack.

Sunlight turns copper, then gold. It spills through the leaves in thick, honeyed bars. She sits at the base of my trunk, her back against my roots. The butterflies settle like luminous snow around us both.

Up close, I can see the faint iridescence of her skin. A pearlescent glow. Wonder made physical.

"What are you?" she asks.

Waira. A spirit bound to this forest. So long that I've forgotten what existed before the binding. I am guardian. Bound to this forest for eternity.

My will pulses these thoughts to her through my forest roots. Flowers blooms beyond the season. A small magical thing. Petals the color of dawn. I was holding it for three hundred years. Waiting. I was holding it for her.

She reaches for it and our fingers almost touch. Almost. The warmth she radiates fills the gap.

"I can't stay long," she said sorrowfully. "I'm not meant to be here. But when I felt you..." She trails off…. "I had to come."

The sun drops below the horizon. Her skin becomes luminescent, casting everything around us in pearl-white light. In that light, I see myself as she sees me. My bones catch her glow. I am gossamer. Ethereal.

For the first time in three hundred years, I don't feel ashamed of what I am.

Her voice moves through me like light through glass. Illuminating the dark places. The ache of isolation melts. Her edges blur into starlight and wind.

"I'm sorry," she whispers. "I can't hold this form long. I'll come back."

The seasons turn. She returns with them. Spring finds her in the green places. Summer catches her in the golden light. Autumn sees her dancing between falling leaves. Me? Bound to earth. Made of wood, bone, and memory. I will wait the way a lover waits. In anticipation.

Three hundred years I have been rooted and grieving. A grief so long, I had forgotten, why.

My hollow chest learned to beat again. Without a heart. Because of her.

Tomorrow, when she returns, we will continue our conversation in the language of butterflies and whispers.

Love. It's the most beautiful thing that can exist. The light passing through shadows, the distance that makes longing possible, the ache that proves you're alive.

The forest smells like her still.

It always will.