An ancient dryad grows beside a desolate graveyard, longing to reveal herself to the golden-haired child who has grown up beneath her boughs, and who has become her new muse after centuries grieving the loss of Calliope, one of her closest friends a...
Rain soaks my skin, wind howling through my branches with vengeance. Battered beneath the persistent sheets of water, a parade of black-clad figures approach my waterlogged boughs from the other side of the fence, where my neighbour, the Darkling, sleeps. They traipse through the shadowy graveyard of beechen green with a heavy lethargy, grey headstones jutting up from the verdurous gloom like Greek dorata piercing flesh.
The wrath of Zeus falls upon the earth today.
I look up at the broiling clouds, wondering what is occurring in the council of the gods that I am no longer privy to. Perhaps Hera has displeased her husband in some way.
Ghosting from branch to branch in my white hawthorn tree, I find a vantage point from which I can watch the funeral parade.
They stop just below me, so we are separated only by the graveyard fence and a divine decree, and as the officiant begins to speak, many bow their heads beneath their thick black umbrellas. One woman even falls to her knees in the mud, rocking back and forth and clutching herself as if she is in agony. Her heartbroken keening is muted by the downpour, but the rawness of her cries reaches down into my heart and wrenches at its strings.
A memory surfaces in my ancient mind, prompted by the woman's crying, of the beautiful Calliope, whose song and words, spoken centuries ago, were enough to move me—then a young dryad—to tears. She was my close friend for many years, before the gods ordained that we would cut all ties with mortals. The rain echoes the tears I have long wept for her.
But the gods have been kind to me. I have found my muse again, in the form of a golden-haired child with the voice of a nightingale.
I feel delicate purple crocuses and pale violets begin to bloom between my roots as a small nugget of warmth kindles inside my chest. How much my little nightingale reminds me of Calliope!
She has begun visiting me almost every day, to read quietly at my feet or climb into my branches to sing. Alas, she has not come to see me this week.
But I should not worry—although mortals do not live long, she is but a child. I have many seasons yet to spend with her.
If only she knew whose company she shared!
O Bacchus, who was my dear friend once, I implore wistfully, won't you allow me to speak to her?
How I would love to see her grow up, to watch from her side as she marries and has a family.
But I know I mustn't.
She can never know I exist.
A shroud of sadness snuffs out my flickering hope, my eyes returning to the keening woman still crumpled in the sodden dirt.
Today the Darkling and I will welcome a new soul into our company.
The fair-haired woman stands now as the gathering begins to sing, wiping her tears before adding her voice to theirs. The rain slowly lessens, and my eyes find they are able to make out her features. A small button nose, tinged with red, sits above rosebud lips opened in quavering song. The pink apples of her cheeks are stained with tears, and her blue eyes are clouded with indescribable grief.
I am struck by a sudden realisation. This woman . . . I've seen her before.
I search among my memories for her face, panic rising in my throat as images pass before me in a blur.
An infant's gurgling laugh; a blush of roses upon her cheeks as she rests blissfully in a loving embrace.
Two clumsy feet picking through the bracken at my roots; two small hands probing at the grass and petals that wind up my trunk.
Golden hair, longer now, streaming in her wake as she learns to run; sunburnt arms pulling herself up into my boughs.
A voice, raised in exuberant song, growing sweeter and brighter with time.
A woman, calling for the girl to come home. This woman, calling to my little nightingale.
I clutch my branch with rigid fingers, frozen as I stare at the woman singing before the freshly-dug grave. Cracks splinter the wood where I touch, tentative tendrils of new green vines unfurling, then withering, as I waver between denial and dread.
It can't be.
Then two men carry out the coffin.
I feel my heart begin to slow, my leaves shaking as if with palsy before they fall, crumpled, to bury the flowers at my feet. An ache blooms in my chest like a bruise as my mind succumbs to a drowsy numbness.
The coffin is tiny, hardly half the height of the men carrying it, and twice as slender.
For a moment I am stone, sitting in my tree like a statue, refusing to comprehend.
But in my heart of hearts, I know who that coffin is for.
I know the fragile body that lies within.
The sound of the rain and the singing falls away, leaving nothing but silence in its wake—silence and a terrible, awful ringing in my ears.
My little nightingale. My beautiful little friend, whom I had so dearly wished to meet . . .
My trunk shudders in pain, cracks spreading further across my bark and deep into my flesh as my soul splinters with the weight of my sorrow.
Just as he took from me my muse Calliope, the Darkling has taken my fair child.
"You were not meant for death, my little nightingale," I whisper to her grave, my words barely uttered before they are carried away on the wind. "But now I must somehow live on without you."
Rain sloughs silently off my hair, the scent of petrichor filling the air with the bitter tang of unbearable pain and resignation. Water drips into my eyes and mouth and seeps through my skin, freezing me to my core, all but drowning me in its tears.
She's gone.
And I am still here.
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