Excerpt: an rud a líonas an tsúil líonann sé an croí

There is an oak tree that will never be felled[1].

There are few that believe this, of course, because anyone that knows anything about oak trees knows that they only live to be two hundred years old, perhaps four hundred for those with longevity. It will be felled, in time, or it will wither and die.

Anyone that cares about, perhaps lusts for, the felling of oak trees to the point of searching for it doesn’t know what they’re looking for. The rare person that does locate it with the intent of testing its ability quickly forgets why they are there, or they are chased away by the wind whispering through the leaves and the unnerving feeling that they are being watched.

Most people just think it’s another tree, although some of them are impressed by its solitary dominance of a small hill.

Trees are not known for their lively antics, because they are old, slow creatures, but they are alive; alive in both their own personal existence and with the buzz and hum of millions of younger, smaller, faster creatures.

This ancient oak is alive, but it is dormant. Its hosts are busy, thrumming with life, supported by the old and arcane power that envelopes the area, turning away unwelcome visitors and rejuvenating the welcome with open branches. It has been asleep for a long, long time, for what feels like – and what is – centuries, perhaps millennia.

But now, as the warm summer sun begins to edge above the horizon and cast its comforting glow across the land, it is beginning to stir.

It wakes, slowly[2], in the welcome heat of the Midsummer sun; it sways its branches in the breeze, feeling the wind move between its leaves. It is drowsy and disorientated. It is a tree, it knows this, but it knows that it is not a tree; it is something greater than a tree can ever be, and it feels trapped and caged in a bark-covered prison.

Slowly, carefully, its mind begins to untangle, to work out what it is missing, to figure out who it is and what it is and why it is. It stretches, the branches stiffening, before relaxing, shaking itself out (much to the dismay of the local wildlife), feeling its way around its current form, from the tip of the highest green leaf to the white, pale roots below, wriggling their way through the soil.

There is something there, it thinks, somewhere down, far beneath the earth. Something that feels more like home than the tree does, something that feels more like the right form. But there is thick, dark, dank soil, alive with thousands of tiny creatures and still moist despite the lack of summer rain, and then there is a vast expanse of nothing, and then there is what is right, but still wrong.

Something is still not right, it knows, as it begins to move down, down towards the earth and the dark and the nothing and the right and the wrong.

As it does this, memory still lingering in the sun-kissed canopy while it flows into the roots, it thinks hard and long, and it begins to remember.

1. It is not the one in Carmarthen, but it might have been in another lifetime.
2. Trees have two speeds: slow and kill.