The Dryad Seed
written by: Michael Graeme
“It won’t be long before the dryads are gone,” she said. “Then the forest will die.”
It was a flame-haired girl, and she was leading an old man by the arm. He was blind but, like me, he felt a disturbance beyond the roar and rumble of distant excavators. It was a tremor in the earth, in the air, and even in the trees. The excavators were invisible, beyond the edge of the forest, but drawing nearer. Before long, there would be houses against the skyline, blocking the sunrise. Their sawtoothed shadows would be upon the forest then, and all that was good would have fled before them.
I was sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree when they came, stepping as if by magic out of the forest’s gloom. At first, I thought she’d paused to let the old man rest. But that’s when she said it, that thing about the dryads, and I knew there was more to it. The old man sat beside me, leaned upon his stick, and sighed. He had an air of rank and wisdom about him.
“If you’ll forgive the intrusion,” he said. “We can tell you’re troubled.”
Well, there was no denying it. “I have the feeling it’s over,” I told him. “It’s more than this.” I gestured to where the noise of destruction was coming from, then remembered he could not see. “The noise, I mean. It’s one thing, symbolic of everything else. It’s all falling apart, everywhere we turn. Nothing is holding firm anymore. My kind… we’ve made such a mess of things. Ruined it for everyone, every creature, plant, tree, and spirit. I’m sorry.”
“We’ve watched you passing this way, since you were a boy,” he said. “You’ve always felt us near, I know.”
It’s true. Don’t ask me how, but I’d always known they were around, even caught glimpses of them from time to time. They were a secretive people, ever watchful. If you were respectful of the ways of the forest, they would reveal themselves as kindly voices. Then, no matter the depth of your troubles, you would return from the forest with a lighter heart. But if you had the kind of heavy feet that crushed the orchids, or hands that broke the saplings for no reason, they would plant demons in your imagination. Then the forest would become sinister for you, while for others it would still be a place of welcome, of inner healing and magic. But now they were leaving, taking what remained of the dryads with them.
They were our last hope, our last crumb of comfort. This was the end of everything.
Some say dryads are like a scattering of glassy seeds. Others, that they are a spirit. The educated say there’s no such thing. They settle among the morning dew, and you tell them apart from dewdrops by the brightness of their sparkle. By night, they appear as fireflies, but you must have the eyes to see, or you’ll see nothing. I have long felt there wasn’t much of the dryad seed around anymore. Then the girl told me they had been gathering what little remained. Like the kind of seed we mortals are familiar with, it could be scattered wherever the earth was fertile. Then it would grow and multiply again. Is that where they were going now? Were they seeking a more fertile fold of the earth, far away from our kind? And there, in peace, would they remake their homes?
The girl had a bag across her shoulder, which I fancied contained the dryads they had rescued. I would have liked to see inside, but it’s dangerous for man to gaze upon what he is not meant to know. Each is wise to abide by the customs of their own kind, while being respectful of the other. As for them, well, they’re never casual in showing themselves. More often, they manifest as a shadow or an idea, so it was also wise to be on one’s guard. After all, did the old stories not warn how such unambiguous encounters as this rarely ended well. Still, I was of the opinion you were safe enough, provided you kept yourself humble and did not beg favours. For sure, a favour might be granted, but there was always a price to pay. To be insulting of their kind, of course, meant injury or even death.
“Can’t you do anything?” I asked. “Can’t you stop it? I mean, what’s happening,… surely this is ruinous to both our kind.”
Was that begging a reckless favour? No. I knew there was nothing they could do, or they would have done it long ago. It was the remit of my kind to shape the earth, to shape it at will, and in our own image. Theirs was to nurture what was there before us, and were powerless to intervene in our affairs.
“It’s a pity you so often make a mess of it,” said the old man. “Your shaping of the world these days reveals the shallowness of your stories.” He sighed, shook his head. “I remember you told such good stories once. But now… it’s as if you have your computers writing them for you. Oh yes. We would gather round your campfires in the old days to listen, thinking we’d learn something. Truly, we are as puzzled by the nature of things as you are, and our race has had much longer to think about it than yours. But now… now, you don’t believe there is any meaning, so we don’t listen to your stories anymore.
“It puzzles us how you think you can live without meaning. Without something that makes sense of your lives, your minds can not help but fall in on themselves, for what else is there to sustain them? But we have come to the conclusion, this is not a weakness on your part. It is more of a protest. All men are born with an eternal twin, one who dwells within you, and he’s asking what are you doing, living this way. And if you do not answer true, if you do not, or cannot do anything about it, he goes away, leaving you as only half a being, and lost. Most of you are only half-beings these days. Is it any wonder you despair?”
“And do you listen to that voice?” said the girl. “Do you ever?”
The old man gathered his thoughts once more. “Oh, you’ve made such strange times for yourselves. You have crafted an era your future historians will call… well, goodness knows what they’ll call it. But these are the last days of it, this cult of riches, of coin. There is little time remaining, then a great upheaval, for you are sawing off the branch of the tree you are sitting on. We have always held your kind in great affection, and would rather not bear witness to what is coming. It was always going to end this way, ever since you wrote us out of your stories. We think you were embarrassed by your belief, in us.”
“The closing of this era,” said the girl, “it’s one in which it senses its own collapse. So the Acolytes of coin are in a frenzy, now, trying to secure whatever further riches they can, and by whatever means, before the game is up.”
“Acolytes?”
“You know them,” she said. “They’re few enough, but they have accumulated vast riches, and thereby wield great power. And though they often comport themselves like clowns, you believe in them, while you do not believe in us. The rest of you… well, it’s the same as being killed and eaten by your own kind. The Acolytes consume you, they drain the marrow from your bones. And you let them. You even blame your brothers and your sisters for your sorrows. We think you have lost your minds.”
Yes, the times had us fearing for our minds. And worse, it was a time when our healers were quitting the field, declining the challenge, or were themselves becoming Acolytes. The best we could hope for was a pill, even though the Acolytes would profit further from selling it to us. But it was a pill that would also rob us of what bits of soul we clung to, yet we felt even this was a price worth paying. The Acolytes promised meaning, at the same time as extinguishing it. The flame-haired girl was right, we had lost our minds.
The old man laid a hand upon my shoulder. “Don’t be too hard on yourself,” he said. “What else can you do but suffer? Talking cures are for those with the coins to pay, and you need your coins for the meter. If it’s any comfort, we have observed the Acolytes themselves are unhappy. The only difference is they are unhappy in comfort, and are never hungry. And they never struggle to find coin for the meter, because… well… they own all the meters.”
“Now you seek meaning in opiates,” said the girl, “and in the infinite pleasure catalogue of online trinketry. But are those not barren regions, even with next-day delivery?”
She smiled, but there was something sad in it, like a smile of fondness for a thing long gone.
“There is no cure for it,” she said. “The story the Acolytes are telling you is a powerful one and must play itself out to its conclusion. Not all your kind are blind to these things. They point out the foolishness in the story’s narrative, the calamity of its ending. But they are sidelined, ridiculed, ejected from your televisual punditry. They are relegated to the backwater realms of YouTube crackpottery, from where they shake their heads in lament. They have better tales to tell, but no one is listening. Only the gods can intervene now, and they tend to be indiscriminate and destructive. If there’s one thing our kinds have in common, it’s we should both tread quietly around the gods.
The sound of the excavator grew louder. The old man tightened his already closed eyes. How long since he’d been able to bring himself to look upon the earth, as it was now? So they were going. They were retreating into the mysterious fastnesses, known only to their kind.
“Must you go?” I asked. “Is there no other way?”
The girl reached into her bag and offered me a small glass jar. Inside, there was a single dryad, like a floating drop of sparkling dew. “Keep this safe,” she said.
“But… how?”
“By your belief in it,” she said.
The excavator appeared in silhouette against the skyline. It was an angry, alien thing, trailing a noxious cloud. There came the sound of splitting wood as it struck a tree and pushed it over. The tree fell with an anguished roar, then a sigh, as the life left it. The impact shook the ground, the air, shook the heart and jarred the brain. And when I came back to myself, the old man, and the flame-haired girl had gone. Only the dryad remained. It seemed a small thing to be pinning much hope on. But then, then the greatest hope was believing it was there in the first place.
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