The Sentinel Tree
By: Malikai Indara

  The lone tree stood in the clearing, devoid of life; his leaves wind-scattered across the desolate plains stretching between two forests. Life had moved past him and yet he stood sentinel, watching over his dead stretch of land as if waiting for the day when life would grace it again. He was once a mighty tree, stretching many times the length of men upward, upward, boughs reaching, stretching towards the sky that they would never quite touch.

  All around him, greenery spread in multi-hued splendour for miles, though none of those young trees reached even half his height, nor were they very close. They were a mere five hundred or so years, and he had seen the coming and going of ages. But even in his age and with his wisdom, he could not halt the flow of time, the inexorable march forward toward the end of all things. But even so, he had a friend.
                                                                                             
  She had come to him one night, a pale ethereal beauty dancing amidst the grass and his own scattered leaves, singing a song of love and life. An elfen woman - He remembered the Elfen, before they migrated away to their serenwilde. They would always dance and sing and take care of the little trees, but then they had gone. She came without the garments of the two-legged ones that they would garb themselves in, and the moonlight seemed to glitter and dance along the pale mounds of bosom, the skin freckled with tiny pebbles against the cold, and she had come to him. She lay her hand on his trunk and he felt the soft magic of the elfen flow into his rough, old bark. And then she spoke to him in a voice fair and soft:

"Old one, why do you sit alone in this clearing while so many trees surround you?"

  He could not reply, not in words, of course. He did not speak but instead tried to convey the desolation of ages, the impending death he would face, the countless forms that had decayed to dust around him. The grass, the other trees, the bushes and flowers, leaving only the desolate clearing in which he stood. The wind whistled softly through his boughs, as if to accentuate his unspoken words. She seemed to understand.

"I will return."

  And she had returned, and draped a soft cloth over his lower branches, fashioning a shelter for herself to lie beneath. She talked to him of the world, the elfen people, the doings of men. And the years passed.

  The years passed, and his friend through the power of her companionship seemed to breathe life into his old boughs, and leaves once more grew on his branches where leaves had not sprouted for a century. But then, like so many other things around him, she passed from the realm of the living.

  The old, mighty tree mourned her death; his leaves fell to cover her soft, naked form on the ground, the leaves that had been for her, the life. He mourned, and the years passed in solitude and silence save for the whistling of the wind in his branches.

  As he was about to breathe his last, as the weight of years and of solitude pressed down on him and bent his trunk, a fleeting awareness danced across his senses. An awareness that was there and then gone, and then came again on the wind. A soft sound, as of whistling wind, but softer. He reached out, his senses searching, seeking, and his attention turned to the place where the elfen woman had died years past.

  In that very place stood a small sapling, branches fluttering softly in the breeze that blew over the clearing. If he could have smiled, he would; he could not die yet. The young one would need some company, after all.