Thank you so so much!! I intend in future stories to make them more readable -- probably use less adjectives and make the sentences less complex, but I'm glad to see someone enjoyed it nonetheless :D

pt. 2

“L-lots of things,” Gill replied. “We hear the wind, I think I heard some wolves and some badgers. I hear the claws of the rats,” Gill gulped and looked around him. “I heard birds … I hear you.” Frost began to spread across the tips of the grass, creeping from the druid toward the men.

“You hear the forest! You hear me! You hear yourselves!” Called the druid. “You seek the trail but in doing so are lost! I am the forest, as you are.” The frost crackled, a latticework of burning blades steadily embraced the men.

“Even in your cities of stone and timber boxes, you must remember from whence you came! The forest moulded your very forms, lengthened your arms, granted you digits, propped you upright so you might stand as tall and proud and firm as the oak!” A puddle ran from the men, melting the icy ground beneath them but for an instant.

A wordless plea burst from Clay, and he moved to his knees before the figure. “Please help us, we were wrong, should have respected your forest more.”

“You should have fear for the forest. You, forest-borne, you should have fear for yourselves.” The men nodded.

“We do, we do.” The druid nodded, the crevasses of his face softening. The cold wind quieted, and it seemed the animals were sleeping. The men sank back, shivering.

“I know you are lost, and the forest commands me to guide you home.” The words seemed to break over Gil and Clay like a wave of warmth. Their postures hung slack. “Have no more fear,” murmured the druid, who had drawn suddenly so near to the companions. “Have no more fear.”

They sat then, together, and it seemed there was naught left to say. Both of the children before the druid had seemed to draw inwards, towards themselves. A hint of warmth brushed the druid’s face, and he knew the forest was smiling.

“When you venture inward, children, you come ever closer to the forest, to who you were meant to be.” Clay just nodded, looking downward at his hand melting a brand into the frosted grass. Or perhaps, melting into the frosted grass. Gill swallowed, then swallowed again, seeming to be about to speak.

“Yes, child?” The druid asked mildly.

Gill tried to answer, but all he could produce were guttural moans. The moons were in the eyes of the men again. Clay called Gills name in a stuttering gasp, staring wildly at the red streaks his fingers left behind on the bejewelled ground.

“It is only the berries’ blood, child, lay back and return to your home.” The druid knelt before the two, pushing them down by their chests with a strength his gaunt frame concealed. “It is a fair exchange,” the druid murmured when the men tried to resist him, clutching at their throats. Clay's fingers scurried about the blades of grass, fumbling toward his metal toys. The druid pinned his hand to the earth. “You took the berries, and the berries take you, and the forest welcomes its children home.” The sounds of rasps, of choking splutters, drafted a melody that mingled with the chirping crickets and the druid’s murmured prayer.

The Druid (not historically accurate)

Small feet and claws clamoured through the undergrowth and roused a druid from its trance. He lifted his head, and pale eyes reflected winged silhouettes traversing a full and vibrant moon. His little grove had a rhythm, a song, as though the forest breathed through his frail form. When the forest held its breath, as it seemed to do now, the druid knew it was waiting for something. For an exchange. It was his place as a part of the forest to intercede with his own kind, when it was necessary. A solemn oath from a forgotten era. The druid held his breath alongside the forest and its children, the plants and animals that formed its whole.

There. Low tones and hurried words trickled through the now-silent underbrush, the trees working to guide the echoes to meet his little grove.

“Mm,” the druid agreed. “They are indeed lost. You may send them to me.”

The druid waited. Though his frail form was draped in white robes, he was near indiscernible among the other hues of the forest, shades of navy and green, all. Even the tangled beard beneath his chin bespoke a form of lichen or wiry fungus. As the human voices grew nearer, as their clumsy legs and feet trampled the limbs and ancient bones of his sylvan brothers, the forest seemed ever quieter and out of balance. A human cacophony met its match in the disquieting silence of the grove as two haggard travelers stumbled into his ferned dominion. They couldn’t have been old, he saw it in the plumpness of youth around their eyes. They were infants in the eyes of the druid, and younger still in the eyes of the forest.

“You told me we would have found the trail by now, Clay,” the shorter, more scantily clad of the travelers muttered. “The moon is halfway across the sky, now.” The other was not interested in listening to their companion, instead choosing to shake and smash a shiny, smooth contraption against the nearest tree. When the violence was done and Claymore had deserted his task, he moved to smashing a longer, circular gadget against a boulder. The other man watched piteously, shifting in anxiety, hardly ever daring a glance into the surrounding wood. A groan escaped him and he clutched his stomach, leaning against the boulder. The druid twitched a finger and a small breeze drifted low through the clearing, snaking among the weeds and grasses until it crept underneath the humans’ feet. It found its target, jostling a bunch of black berries peeking around the stone. “Thank God,” the man whispered, and grabbed a handful.

“What is it, Gill?” The one called Clay still stared in futile at his broken toys. The druid observed the two as they gorged on berries. No sacks, no supplies. No food, no water, and for some time. No anticipation that they should need for anything because humans never want to believe that they truly need anything. They want to believe that they know all that sustains them. No thought is given to what the forest thinks they need. They are used to being provided for by others of the human kind. They forgot what all the other kinds provide. The druid had heard tales of their markets; cart-fulls of food, but no trees nor bushes in sight. Haunches of pork, naked pheasants, but no animals to be found in their cities of stone, save for rats and those that eat them. They fight to keep the forest out and they take only what they want from it. They take none of the frigid cold, none of the thorns, none of the rot, the decay, the death. They want none of the grizzly, nor the skunk, nor the panther. They don’t want confusion, they don’t want to be lost. So, they make a trail. And along this trail, they allow to live only what they want for comfort. The prettiest of flowers, the juiciest and sweetest of berries. In their racket they quiet the forest, for they want none of the queer howls and grunts. Yet in their imposition of order on the world they are truly lost, just as Clay and Gill are.

“As they were,” the druid said.

The two humans finally ceased their racket, the whites of their eyes like little moons come to earth.

“What was that?” Gill’s voice was hardly a whisper. Clay didn’t respond, and the two hazarded a glance at the surrounding forest and scanned the clearing. Their eyes passed over the druid as though he wasn't there, tucked between bramble and brush.

“What do you hear,” Clay whispered back. Gill shrugged, and the two sat together in the darkness in the centre of the clearing, lost and afraid. No longer. A smile crept over the druid’s mouth as he beheld the two travellers’ first forest trance. A cold sharp wind filtered through the undergrowth at the druid’s back, erecting fine hairs along a pronounced spine. It was time. The druid finally drew his breath.

“What do you hear?” A voice like cracking thunder emanated from everywhere, from nowhere, ensnaring, enrapturing, penetrating the bodies of the two huddled men. Rodents scurried over the ferned wall, birds flapped their wings and shrieked. The druid rose slowly over the clearing, rising first to his knees, as if in a mockery of prayer, and then to his feet. Upwards and upwards he rose over them, feet upon feet, no man should be so large, so thin. But still he rose. His bare feet and twisted nails lifted gently off of the forest floor, and up, and up. He stopped in the centre of a vortex of leaves and twigs and dirt. He tipped his head slowly backwards, the dirty white robe slipping to reveal a grin like the gash of a dark, wet ravine. And the druid rejoiced in the symphony, the crooning of wolves, the snarls of unknown creatures, and the cries of men.

“What! Do! You! Hear!” The humans wept beneath him.

“Please,” cried one of the men. “What do you want? What do you want?”

“Do you know what I am, children?” The men panted, and found each others’ hands. They were silent again, holding their breaths, until Gill was moved to speak.

“Y-you’re a druid! Right? A druid, a keeper of the wood?” At once, the rodents stopped their maddening scramble, the birds nested. The soles of the druid’s feet met earth again.

“Y-you are, aren’t you!” Gill turned to his companion, panting. “Clay, you remember, right? In school? In the Forgotten Days, the druids defended the wood, remember?” Clay nodded. “They were a boon for the peoples of the forest.”

They both turned back to the gaunt figure in the centre of the clearing, their abject fear driving them toward solace in the dream of a hope. The moon rose above the druid's head, and in this light, the druid seemed as much a saint as anything the men had ever seen. Birds flitted to his shoulders, rats and ferrets scurried over his feet, snakes weaved and wound beneath his robes.

“What do you want from us,” Clay whimpered, voice breaking.

“I want,” said the druid in his booming voice, “to know what you hear.”

(ctd)