Denial

I had to pace around to get my bearings, but it was clear that I was on the right track. The difficulty, now, was finding any sings of egress in this forest after that downpour that I had almost been swept away in; before.

There was almost no chances of any footprints that just so happened to survive that amount of water. The earth was swept clean.

I closed my eyes, and mentally recounted the scene in its every explicit detail. The broad feather that I had held in my hand like a mighty saber, and the path I carved through the trees as I playfully absconded from the encounter in a casual arc, were a dance that I mimed myself through; step by step.

Slowly, I retraced my footsteps, until the sensation of Janny's hand on my bicep ripped me from my fantasy. I nearly jumped, but when I opened my eyes I was thankful for it, as I saw myself headed straight for a slender, newborn tree with stark, striated bands of black and white that indicated an accelerated growth period.

"Woah!" I laughed, "Thank you, Janny. I can't believe I almost waddled right into this thing. I don't know what I was thinking; wandering about like this, with my eyes closed." but Janny narrowed his eyes at me, all the same.

"That's not like you, Zoel. You don't make those kinds of mistakes. What were you trying to do?"

"Oh, I just... well, it was hard to remember what it looked like when there was light, so I thought I could retrace my steps better with the picture in my head. Pretty dumb idea, huh?" I blushed, embarrassed at the clear short-sighted nature of my plan. I could have stepped on any manner of dangerous plant or creature buried underfoot.

He didn't seem convinced, squinting at the tree, instead of myself. "If anyone is capable of retracing their steps blindfolded through the stalks, it's you, Zoel. That's not the problem."

"Don't be ridiculous! That... can't be possible, you know? Even Rilah wouldn't be able—"

He cut me off with an objection. "You're not Rilah. You can't compare yourself to her, Zoel. None of us see you that way, and it's holding you back."

I mumbled, "Maybe you don't..." hoping that he wouldn't be able to make it out over the not-so-distant screams, but he seemed to have anticipated the comment regardless, because his response was too quickly formulated.

"You don't get to tell me what I've seen, and what I've learned. The glade has always held the both of you in high regard, and there is talk about who could replace Vassur. Rilah wasn't the only candidate, Zoel. You know that."

My mouth gaped slightly, as I thought back to the flower, and the mammoth spider. I had thought before about how close to death I had come, but I now realized that it didn't change the fact that my survival may not have been a coincidence.

"You know the stalks well enough to avoid clear pitfalls that would have killed us several times over, and you have never gotten lost as long as I have known you." He pressed his palm against the surface of the sapling's pliable trunk; testing its structural integrity before continuing. "You made it back to us, even though we had no hope of returning the favor, and you wove through the trees just now without touching a single branch; until you came across this tree."

Fimbs chimed in, now, finally gathering the thread of the conversation. "You think there's something off about the tree?"

"Yes, but I can't imagine what..." He rubbed his chin, thoughtfully, looking for the edge corner of a puzzle in a pile of unsorted pieces. "Why was it so hard to avoid this one?"

I shrugged, "I really think I just forgot it."

He made a noise with his mouth that resembled the foghorn that the glades use in emergencies. "Wrong. You were focusing as hard as you could on Rilah's memory, just then. Earlier, you remembered where to find a swarm of gnats that were barely visible to the naked eye. You wouldn't have allowed yourself to forget something as huge as this tree."

I scoffed, trying to bring reality back into this conversation. "That's hardly the same thing..."

Fimbs volunteered, hopefully, "I think what he's saying is that even if you had previous knowledge of the flies, you were perceptive enough to see it in the little bit of firelight we brought with us. Would you have really missed something this obvious?"

"I don't know what to tell you two! I just closed my eyes, and it wasn't there!" I sighed, throwing up my hands in exasperation.

Janny stopped, and looked at me. "It wasn't there?"

"Yeah! I have no memory of this stupid thing, alright?

He looked at it again in amazement, as the cogs turned in his mind. Fimbs stepped closer, as if the novelty was contagious, and she had become convinced of the farce, herself. "Come on," I urged, impatiently. "This is a complete waste of time."

She shook her head, like she was seemingly onto something, and gestured me closer. "No, I think there's something there. Let me see the torch."

"Are you joshing me?"

Janny was determined to give her the chance. "No, hand it over. I want to see what she's figured out."

I sighed, and handed it over, and she held it close to the branch that was closest to her level. She leaned in close, watching it for several moments, before shaking her head. "I thought it would be more apparent, but it's hard to tell. I'd have to look at the top to be sure."

Janny seemed more lost than ever. "What is it that you're looking for?"

"Growth," she replied, drawing close to him. "Can you give me a lift?" He gladly knelt down, so that she could straddle his neck with her thighs, and picked up her diminutive body easily, when he went back to stand at attention.

"What do you mean?" I asked, completely at a loss for what they had seemingly discovered without me. "The forest is always growing, isn't it? Is it really that special to know that this one is growing as well?"

Janny shook his head. "You might not know this, but her family was in the lumber district. No one could understand the forest like Rilah, but you would be hard pressed to find some one that knows better than her kin about the trees, themselves."

"...and I was right!" Fimbs exclaimed, staring proudly at the meristem.

Now, it was my turn to be completely lost. "I seriously don't know what I'm looking for."

"The tip of the tree is growing so fast that you can visibly see it stretching." She smiled broadly, as if vindicated by the tree for the time we'd spent so far on studying it. "You can see it on the lower boughs, too, but I had to check up here where it was much more pronounced; to be sure. The reason you couldn't remember something that looked this striking was because it simply wasn't there before."

I stared, and nothing seemed to change. "You're crazy. Trees can't grow that fast! It takes weeks for something to even gain a few inches!"

"Look closer!" She insisted, as Janny slowly lowered her back down to the floor. "It's still very slow to our human eyes, but if you're watching it carefully, you can see the shoots unfurling like the petals of a flower. Here, try holding the tip against your hand."

I looked again, still utterly unconvinced that such a thing were even possible, but humored her by measuring the length of branch against the edge of my index finger. Sure enough, the tip extended at a pace that would frustrate even a snail, but it did indeed extend past the edge of my fingernail as I watched.

I blinked at the motion in the mildest of surprise, but then turned back to Fimbs; willing to trust her expertise. "Wow, you're right! But what does this change?"

"Have you ever wondered why we can't just chop down the forest?"

I nodded. "My atha told me that the forest was eternal. I just assumed that it would anger the animals there, and that's why we only harvest wood from the Daylight; where the animals can't really harm us that much."

Fimbs grinned, seemingly ecstatic that she gets to share this knowledge—her freckled cheeks displaying the secret charm of two deeply indented dimples, when she smiled—and again I was taken aback. I was struck by how much more lovely she was without the hollow veil of death hanging on her features.

"Haha! That's where you're wrong! See, your kin gave you wisdom that you missed. The forest is eternal, but not because of any animals that might come to defend it. The trees themselves just happen to replace themselves faster than human hands can cut!

"In the zones past the Mesotaigatic, all the land is in fierce competition for the sunlight. People used to try to clear the trees away, but it would always be returned by the time that they cleared the lumber! Any gap that was exposed to the great blue is refilled in minutes, not days. And the difficulty to haul the trees after you've fallen them was too great to be worth the risk of enduring in the darkness."

It finally dawned on me, what she was leading towards. "Then, that means...!" I mused, looking directly overhead.

"Yes!" she laughed, as I demonstrated the understanding of what she had discovered. "There used to be a patch of sunlight over here. Maybe, even directly overhead! Zebracomb trees slow down in the shadows, and eventually die. The fact that it's still growing at such a rapid pace means that the canopy had only just closed. Judging by the size of this sapling, I would say that we missed it by about thirty minutes, or so."

Janny finished her thought. "So, something must have punched its way through."

Fimbs nodded. "And it must have been huge."