Oak Tree Image Novels & Stories

“It’s not possible,” Mac said quietly, standing at the edge of Hope’s garden, looking at the small oak sapling with its cluster of pale, impossible blossoms. “Oaks don’t flower in October. They barely flower at all in the traditional sense. Something else must be growing through it.”

She was smiling at him from the surface of the water. *“Don't just stand there, Rowan,”* her voice whispered in the wind. *“The world is waiting.”* Rowan looked up. A hundred miles away, in the center of the new world, a single, massive oak tree stood. It wasn't made of marble or silver. It was made of wood and leaf. And carved into the trunk, high enough for everyone to see, was a single word. **[START]** But as Rowan turned to join the others, he felt something cold in his pocket.

The grass at this edge was pressed entirely flat in the specific, directed way of grass that has been flattened by the passage of many heavy things moving in the same direction rather than by wind or weather, and the trees here bore the evidence of concentrated force applied to them in ways that would have been decisive if the trees had not been the specific trees they were, rooted in the specific ground they were rooted in, connected through that ground to everything that Nova had been asking the forest to do on our behalf. One oak near the center of the northern edge had split down its length, the crack running from somewhere above the first major branch junction all the way to the ground,

The accumulation of fifteen years of being together had made the arrangement more fully itself, not less. They stood under the oak. The June light came through the full canopy in the specific quality of the filtered summer light — green and warm and particular. The oak's trunk was wide — wider than Ernest could reach around, wider than two people could reach around together. The bark was rough, the texture of the old oak, the specific pattern of ridges and crevices that had formed over decades. The roots spread out from the base, some of them visible above the ground, the evidence of the tree's underground life.

The oak tree let out a loud piercing scream. It was a sound that was not natural. Rather like something from a machine. The sound waves vibrated through Elara’s body making her bones feel like they were shaking. The golden energy she had put into the tree’s roots was spreading fast like a wildfire. It was lighting up the network of roots making the forest floor look like a sheet of glass. For a moment Elara could see the glowing roots pulsing with energy like they were alive.