The Last Dance of the Trees
We were dancing when the first of us fell.
Odora, seeded but five winters ago, her slender birch trunk already as white as the deepest root, fell. She fell face first, her full length crashing through the air as her hand brushed mine. I laughed, for the young are sometimes clumsy, and it is better to laugh at oneself than cry. I stooped to raise her up, my brown hands covered with vines and bright red berries.
Her body was dead.
The dance stopped at my cry, trees wading through the earth to gather around. From the stiffness of her limbs and the way she lay, we knew she had been felled. I raised my eyes, seeing Aldoris, old and tall, close his eyes and bow his shaggy head.
The next moment he, too, fell.
Crashing down on us, on Hollia, Annae, on Odora's still body.
"Our trees are being felled!" Hollia cried it, and I looked at her feet, and saw them, the first of the wounds.
I looked at Serissa, a nymph of a beech tree, and the fastest of us. "Go to King Tirian, at the hunting lodge. Tell him, tell him!" I stooped down again, straining against the weight of Aldoris's dead body.
I raised Annae to her feet, turning towards the others.
Half the dance was dead. Half were felled, lying as logs, as the dead wood that would never breathe nor dance nor grow again.
Serissa ran. I looked to the sky, to the bright sun that called to mind the Lion's living gold. "Aslan, let them cut her last."
Annae—oldest of the Dryad's that still danced, young of heart and deep of root—stiffened and cried out.
She fell.
One blow. One blow felled this mother of many.
We were too far to make it home.
One by one the rest fell. We sought each other's hands, holding each other while the hands still lived—while we still could reach for the sky.
They all fell. I, I was the last.
I closed my eyes. I raised my hands. If I must fall, I would fall while dancing.
My dance ended in one blow.