Kneeling beside a large rock, she pokes the mossy undergrowth, giggling with amusement at its strange texture. It looks like a perfect playground for baby fairies testing out their wings for the first time, so she looks around for evidence of fey life. Tuney can insist that magic isn't real as much as she likes, but Lily knows better. And, to her never-ending joy, their father does, too. Whenever she hears her sister or her mother dismiss her fantasies as mere imagination, she rolls her eyes and drowns them out with the memory of her father telling her that nature is too perfectly chaotic for there not to be something else out there. She might not understand what 'chaotic' means, but it sounds beautiful, and it never fails to reassure her.
Needless to say, exploring the outside world with her father is her favourite thing ever.
"Lily, come here," he calls, and the young girl leaves the little wonderland and runs over to him, eager to see what he might have found. "Have you seen a tree stump up close before?"
She shakes her head, sending her red plaits bouncing around like a cat toy. "Only in books."
"Do you want to?"
She nods enthusiastically, and he steps back to reveal an old, wizened cylinder sticking up out of the ground. Its sides look much like she would have expected – just like any tree, really – but its top is flat and has a strange series of circles covering it.
"See those rings?" her father asks, tracing one of them with his index finger. "They're called growth rings. They show the tree's age. The more rings a stump has, the older the tree was when it was cut down."
She reaches out and tenderly runs her finger along one of the other rings until it ends up back where it started. "There are so many of them," she whispers. "This one must have been ancient."
His merry laughter steals her attention like a pixie wreaking havoc on an unsuspecting family, and she looks up with an entranced smile on her face. "'Ancient' might be a bit of an exaggeration," he says, his voice warm, "but it does look like it was pretty old. You know, people actually go to uni to learn how to tell how old trees are."
"But can't you just count the rings?"
Her father chuckles. "There's a little more to it than that. They don't always just grow one ring a year; things like midsummer droughts can make them grow more than one in a year. I guess the tree thinks that the cycle of seasons has already finished or something. Even the distance between the rings says things about what weather conditions were like at the time."
Awe and wonder flitter across her face as she looks back down at the tree stump, and her hands wander across it as if it's a magnet drawing her in, making it impossible for her to be near it without gravitating towards it. "People can work out all of that from this?"
"It's amazing, isn't it? You never know what's inside something until you look – really look – for it. It's just like a birthday present; you can have fun guessing what's inside, but you can never really know for sure until you open it up."
Her eyes light up like emerald fire. "Can I have a tree stump for my birthday? I won't ask for anything else, I promise."
"I'll talk to your mother about it and see what we can come up with," he tells her, and she squeals in delight before throwing her arms around him. "Should we continue on to the river now?"
She nods against his chest but, when she pulls back so that she can glance around at the other trees, petulantly adds, "I wish we could see how many rings those trees have."
"Unfortunately, we'd have to cut them down for that. And we wouldn't want to do that, would we? We need to cut trees down so we can build things and light fires and study nature, but we shouldn't do it unless we need to."
"We shouldn't," Lily says in agreement, her face the picture of seriousness, "because that would mean the fairies would have to find somewhere else to live."
"Exactly," he agrees. "And we wouldn't want that, would we?"
"Never."
"Never ever?"
Recognising the familiar game, she grins as she says, "Never, ever, ever."
"Well, that's certainly a good reason to leave them be," he jokes.
She turns back to trace the lines on the tree stump again, and they fall into companionable silence. After a few moments, however, she ruefully says, "Daddy, you don't have to cut down a tree just for me."
Laughing, he takes her hand in his. "How about this: we won't cut down any trees that wouldn't need to be removed anyway."
"Okay," she replies. "But make sure you're really sure first."
A/N: …I'm reading Anne of Avonlea and obsessing over the second season of Green Gables Fables at the moment, and that might have leaked over here a little. Favourite literary redheads, though, right?
Anyway, I'm thinking of extending this, but I'm going to wait until this round of the competition is over to work on any other chapters.
On that note:
Hogwarts Writing Club Competition – prompt: rings
Word count: 828