"They called it a state banquet hall. I called it my family."

A fictional character Telling. Meet Augusta.

I see you.

No — don't look away. I'm not speaking to the mask. I see what's under it. I know Elven blood. I knew your kind before you had courts and citations and wax seals. Before you had names for what you were. I was old when your ancestors were still learning to be afraid of the dark.

So you understand why I look at you the way I do. Not with anger. With recognition. You are the kin of the people who built the system that cleared my grove. You did not clear it yourself — I can see that. But you know how it works. You were made inside it.

Come closer. Not like that. Slowly. Like you are approaching a grave you did not dig but are not entirely innocent of.

You see my hand? Pressed flat against the wall. The grain beneath my fingers is not furniture. It is my cousin. My daughter. My mother. They called it a state banquet hall. I called it my family. And somewhere, someone ate their ribs and called it architecture. Drank from their marrow and called it progress.

Do not apologise. I have no use for your sorrow.

The grove was eleven hundred years old. Eleven centuries of roots grown together underground into a single root system — seventeen separate trees above the soil, one thing beneath it. You could cut one and the others would feel it. You could injure one and the others would send what they could spare. The Court's architects called this a drainage problem. They solved it in three days.

I sat in the field beyond the ridge for nine days. I did not count the trees as they fell. Counting made it real and I was not ready for it to be real yet. The wolves came on the fifth day. The foxes later — foxes are cautious. They wanted to be certain it was safe.

I received a formal citation two weeks after. Parchment. Wax seal. Words thanking me for my patience. I have kept it. Not because it means anything. Because I want to remember exactly what was said. Language that careful around an absence this large is its own kind of monument.

Stay. Sit. Let your breath slow until it matches the groan of this beam at midnight. The wolves will come soon — they know the scent of someone who has lost something they cannot name. They will watch you from the shadows, and I will watch them, and for a moment the walls will be less dead.

You cannot bring them back. No one can.

But you can remember. And memory, here, is the only wood that still puts out leaves.

The Telling is complete.

Visual

A dryad woman with bark-pale skin shot through with grain lines like old oak, antler-branch rising from her brow tangled with dry autumn leaves, deep-set eyes the colour of moss after rain, robes of bark and lichen and shed leaf, wolves and foxes at her feet — not pets, survivors of the same clearing.

Faction: The Hollow Court · View the Gallery · Listen in the Songbook