Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

ROOT AND VEIN by Erin Hoffman

In the time before time, when the world was young and spirits now ancient walked the earth on their first legs, there lived a dryad of the green wood. In those days the trees had not yet their stillness, and roamed on curling roots dexterous as acrobat hands, searching.

The dryad gave her first heart to an alchemist. She watched him at his work; his blunt-fingered hands were soft and clever with herb and glass, and surely he would know how to care for living wood. With a paring knife she opened her chest, golden sap blackening as it ran in rivulets to her waist, and cut away the soft spring green of her first heart.

The two that remained skipped a beat, leaving a lingering moment of promised silence.

The alchemist accepted the heart as he would a great treasure, and studied it. “No,” he said at last, rueful. “I am afraid I can find no use for this. What purpose may it serve, needing so much care? A thing of value would live on its own. Imagine wood that creates its own light, and feeds upon air! Truly this one is quite plain.”

As the heart withered on the alchemist’s shelf, the dryad’s roots slowly stiffened. The packed earth of the town’s road confounded her footing, and she returned to the soft forest loam, where she found a painter who spoke of the hearts of trees with great reverence. He walked among the shells of the first stilled, spirits of trees whose roots had fled forever into the dark safety of the soil, silent monuments to love that feared and failed. Their branches, crowned with sunset stars in the crisp fall wind, whispered a requiem for their questing.

Under the shade of her brethren the dryad rested, and the painter remained, reciting his legends of arboreal beauty. He spoke of the glory of twilight, of the everlasting merit of shadow.

The dryad’s second heart was the color of falling leaves. When she pulled it from her ribs it gave a crack as of an autumn apple bitten at its ripest perfection, and her next breath was shallower than her last.

“How beautiful,” the painter said. “It is my greatest treasure, beyond my deserving.”

He crafted a pedestal and painted it white, the better to contrast the heart’s crimson veins and bronze wood. And there the heart rested in its loveliness, but under the elements, with time, began to fade. “I will travel to the white rivers of the far mountains and bring a font of crystal water,” the painter said. But this was a great undertaking and there were many things he must do first.

While he planned the heart began to dwindle, its crimson veins collapsing slowly to rust powder; the painter wept for it, but his tears were of salt that could not quench its thirst, and at last it died. The painter remained captured by the memory of its beauty, and stayed by the pedestal singing songs of its loss. His high voice haunted the whispering forest, and the dryad, with a deep quiet spreading through her, could not remain.

Beyond the borders of the forest thick snows had blanketed the roads, so the dryad did not stumble, and in their stiffness her feet no longer felt the cold. In time it seemed that the brightness of the snow under the dove grey sky was soothing and complete. Why not linger with the ice, succumb to the quietude that filled two thirds of her hollow breast? To her last heart the silent arms of the still forest beckoned.

But it could not be, for nothing mythical can rest, and there remained only the road ahead and the one behind. She was a creature of nature, and hers was not to retreat, though the forest with its dark warmth compelled. With no sun in the sky she followed the road, and with time the shadows of the still forest faded behind her.

Across her path passed a cloaked traveler, and his charcoal steed was an old work horse. They shared the road, and in that companionship the cloaked man told of his travels, and asked the dryad of hers. For the first time she tested a throat that had known no sound, and learned her voice.

“How old is the sky?” she asked him, when the stories of their travels were done. For it seemed as though she had walked the earth for centuries, and the sky had always been there.

The traveler thought on this for many miles. Finally he said that he did not know, and though he had met many wise men on his travels, none had been older than the sky. But he spoke of places where the sky had been the burning scarlet of young flame, or painted with strokes of colors so luminous they had no names. And he spoke of what he did know, of trees that swayed beneath autumn ghost moons, and of the stars that had been his compass.

The dryad’s third heart came forth so red that it was almost black, the color of summer grapes in the shade, and of winter pomegranates. The traveler’s dark eyes were serious as his weathered hands closed around it. Many more leagues they traveled together, the cloaked man, the dryad, and the grey horse.

“It grows dry,” the cloaked man said of the heart one day, and from a skin at his saddle he poured a careful measure of water upon it. Its wood drank deeply and stretched, growing two slender limbs that reached to the sky. Deep in her empty chest the dryad surged with life, cool and heady. This sustained the heart, and something within the dryad began to awaken. But the traveler with this was not satisfied. “It needs the sun,” he said, indicating buds that dotted the heart’s reaching arms, the color of polished wood, and his eyes. “We will go west, to the summer country.”

After three days the clouds broke and branches of sunlight reached down to melt the snow. As it ran away in rivulets that etched the spongy ground the dryad felt startled warmth returning to her feet.

And when the sun touched the dryad’s heart, its buds grew palest spring green before exploding into violet flowers. Its blooming arms lengthened, and downward stretched roots that found the ground and grew steady upon it. At last it opened eyes of charcoal grey, eyes that shone with the newness of spring. Within the dryad’s chest new life bloomed, a new warmth that carried its own sunlight within, and fed upon the air.

The dryad and her daughter did not have much time, for the younger could not remain still, even in the warmth of the summer country. The older dryad warned of alchemists that would measure a dryad’s heart and find it wanting, of painters that lived trapped in an image worshiped greater than life. And she told her of gentle travelers, who knew what it was to seek the sun. The traveler told the new dryad of the ways of the road, and the importance of caring for one’s steed. With this advice they were rueful, for they knew as they watched her that her heart was her own, neither spring green nor the violet of winter pomegranates, and it would require its own language, a language of sun and snow and withering.

As they watched the dryad’s daughter begin her journey south, the traveler shed his cloak and folded it across the grey horse’s saddle. “You dryads are fortunate to have three hearts,” he said. “Men have but one, and it can never leave us.”

“Then it should be carefully tended,” the dryad said, and placed his hand in hers. Beneath the traveler’s skin a new life stirred, life that had grown a dryad’s heart. “For it must last through all the seasons of the world.”