The creaking and bowing of wood, subtle in its sorrow under the roaring pain of the fire; the hills were alight with violence, the sky was black with choking ash, the ground shook with terror. Piercing streams of light struck through the heart, molten sludge and cinders strangling the veins and the arteries. It beat, but only just; slow, thick, thready, trembling. It was not long for this world.

Yet it kept beating.

Eyes flitted about among the fire. Birds scattered from the flames, seeking for oases among the sea of smoke and embers in which they could hide. Foxes and rabbits and wolves waited out the storm in the deepest parts of their dens, as far away from the rolling heat as they could be. Trembling things hid beneath the rubble, cowered in the ash, that the inferno might forget them. The heart kept beating, but only just. Entombed in dense, scorched wood, pumping with fire and magma, burning brighter within than ever before.

There, among the ashes, its broken crown bleeding and its whole body burning, a figure slowly rose to its feet. Ardent as the forest around it, as the forest it was, it cared little for the fire. It looked high, past the canopy alight, and into the sky. That vicious providence, those burning words, spoken with fire and ash. A new beginning.

It knew, for it could feel the forest’s heart beating heavy and determined in its chest.

The glittering ash scattered into that wide open night sky, whose pale light the great burning contended with… a thousand stars among it, like eyes, expectant.