I had a dream. A dream of a wood, old beyond imagining, rich with life, thick with deep, heavy fertility, laden with the smells of eternity. The trees were tall; the trees were strong. And they beckoned, though they did not need to move. Their proud straightness alone was a magnetic force. And their silence was a pregnant moment waiting for a voice. And I was drawn toward them.
How many other travellers had heard this call? How many had become lost in this wood or found a home here? But the silence pressed in tight, and the wood closed around me. And where I had expected to hear the distant conversing of birds and the careless accompaniment of splashing water, there was only the soughing of a dry wind. The soughing of a dry wind through brambles, thick, black, and wicked, clinging closely to the bases of trees, sinking thorns deep into aged bark. And what had been the rich, sticky-sweet smell of life swelling deep in the earth became the cloying scent of decay, of death bursting through the soil in repellent, fungous growths.
The wood cringed about me, as if each creature in every nest and burrow and cocoon were recoiling from the smell that I had caught. And although the motion subsided quickly, the vision remained with me, like bright flashes in darkness. The wood was steeped with life, saturated with creatures, each cowed, as I was, by the unexpected intimation of doom.
But the trees were tall and proud. The brambles, though twining vine-like through the limbs, were nothing to the ancient strength of the trees.
A soft groan touched my ears, the sound of weight shifting, settling. It came from a tree, like many of the others around me, heavy with sigils and signs, carved deep with coats of arms and patents of rectitude. With a dull pop, it sagged against its neighbor, a younger tree, uncarved and unmarked, but no less tall or broad. The young tree bowed, trying to roll with the weight of its older neighbor, but the groan of its bending ascended to the shriek of living wood splintering. The two trees crashed to the forest floor, leaving the final shriek hanging in the air. But while the young tree crashed and splintered bitterly and violently, leaving a quivering stump and savage echoes, the older tree landed with a dull thud, and disintegrated to reveal an interior seething with insects and pungent with dead ichor. Where it had entered the ground, the trunk had pulled free, leaving a shallow, musty wound, where all its roots had long since dissolved in the grey leprous soil that remained.
And suddenly I saw how many of the dead but still erect trees there were, each sagging against the living one beside them, hanging like a sword above the healthy trees of the forest. These standing dead were holding the living hostage against their pride, their will to outlast their lives. It was then that the silence found a voice, and it was singing a song of death.
How could no one have seen that the wood had been dying for so long? How many young trees could shrug their way through the dead weight entangling them?
A shadow passed near me, a force shrouded in blackness, which left a bright flickering behind as it fled. A flickering of fire. Before I could move, the fire leaped to the fallen tree, consuming the crumbling, dry wood, and destroying the insects with pops that merged into a steady sizzle.
The wood came alive again, with creatures mindlessly fleeing the blaze, but not quickly enough, for the fire leaped ahead of them, tree to tree, bramble to bush, cutting them off, mercilessly devouring them. Leaves ignited on branches in the searing air, and trunks exploded as the sap inside them flashed to steam. Somehow, above the infernal roar, arose another sound, a shrill keening, the combined cries from the throats of a million million incinerated creatures, and the creaking of a million million falling trees.
After a time, which was forever, or might only have been an instant, the fire was over. Smoke and steam concealed everything, and the sounds were of fading hissing and crackling, and the exhausted groan of great weights shifting one last time to their last resting places. And a wind stirred, but not a dry wind - a fresh wind, which stripped the smoke from the smoldering wreckage and carried away the sounds of ruin.
The trees that remained stood battered and blistered, but untangled in the sunlight. The brambles were seared away, and the standing dead were ashes. The creatures that returned were the strong and vigorous, the song that they took up was the song beyond the song of death: It was a song of defiance, of renewal. The voice had found the song of life.
Some things can only be cleansed with fire.
I had a dream. A dream of fire.
David Nilsen, Survival Margin
