Jeshara

Chapter Five

Chapter five

Since I'm still here, you can see Naiomi didn't kill me, but she came as close as a peace loving forest spirit could to murder. Why was she pissed at me? Well she's got some pretty good reasons. She wasn't mad because I stopped the boy from killing the girl thankfully. Actually, she was rather impressed by that when she had confirmed the story with the trees around fern pond. However she was mad about a couple other things.

One, I had said in passing at some point, 'call me Jess' and though that probably didn't matter I wasn't supposed to use my old nickname when referring to myself. If I had said Shara it would have been fine.

Two, I hadn't attempted disguise the fact that I was a forest spirit. In my defense I had just fallen out of a tree but, Naiomi did teach me how to alter my features a few weeks ago. It's really cool, with a little effort I can change my hair, eye, and skin color, alter my height, and change my face shape theoretically whenever I please. The trouble is it takes a lot out of me and I'm only allowed to use it in dire emergencies. Gah! I'm going off topic again, back to my mistakes.

Three, I had given the boy the forest's blessing. That's not good for a couple of reasons, it made it bluntly obvious that I was a forest spirit.

Not everyone knows all the tales of the magical protectors of the forests, but everyone knows how to identify one. People are very superstitious and suspicious when it comes us. We've been believed in since the beginning. In fact some of the first animistic religions and stuff like that, saw us as goddesses, which is kinda cool but we didn't want the extra attention. Well, i'd love it but that's this self centered jerk talking. It may seem weird but people are scared of us.

The fact that we used to be human and now possess supernatural, that word is really ironic in this situation, powers is really disturbing to them. It doesn't help that the area me and Naiomi lived was very christian, and anything magical that wasn't God had to be evil.

Also, the forest's blessing is for desperate people who really deserve it you can't just give it away to anyone. If you wanted to sum up the past half a page with one sentence it would be, i'm in deep doo-doo.

I'm not allowed to leave the clearing for a whole moon cycle! It's one thing to be grounded but, because I have to get my own food I would have to survive a whole month on the handful of roots and leaves I could get my hands on. You might think that's unfair, but she probably forgot about the whole food thing, she hasn't eaten in 900 years. That's only about say, 30 years of age in the life of a forest spirit.

Anyway, other than that things went pretty normal for the next few weeks. We continued my training and finished the final tweaks in the transition from spring to summer. Did I not mention that? We help the forest change seasons, we don't control it but some trees need little reminders: wakey-wakey winters over, shed your blooms here comes summer, or don't change color yet, you have another moon until fall, stuff like that. It wasn't 'till the leaves changed color that my world began to change with it.

I say fall because that's when we noticed more human activity in the forest, lumberjacks cut down a few large trees on the outskirts of the woods. That wasn't unusual as winter was approaching and it's better to take one old tree than several young ones. We performed their, how would you say this.... services, returning their essence to the earth.

It wasn't until February-ish that the bad stuff started happening. It wasn't obviously bad at first, just inconvenient. If we had known what those men were doing so far into the woods that fateful, freezing day, things would have happened a lot differently.

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There wasn't any snow on the ground that morning. We had a little heat wave a few days earlier and the last of January's snow had melted. There would be more soon, I could smell the clouds rolling in, but at the moment the ground was covered with only it's usual morning frost. The kind that crunches like Autumn leaves under your feet.