Forest Fire

Night was cast unto the lands, stars and dust scattered throughout the sky like the remnants of fallen rain caught on the web of a spider, weighing it down in a graceful arc over the moist grounds. The air was rushing quickly through the bark of the great pines, whistling in fluid undertones. The forest groaned a living sigh when the sturdy trunks bent into the wind, the branches reaching like arms to try and catch their leaves as they were taken up by the gales. Deep within the pit of the forest where darkness reigned even in the day and no creature dared travel unarmed, a spark caught from a fire left unattended and was taken up at the base of the forest's heart tree.

It was an old, sorrowful pine with drooping boughs hung with moss like lace gowns had been draped upon it. The trunk was six feet in diameter, a massive and archaic giant. The surrounding trees were saplings in comparison and this tree had been their father, the eldest of them all.

The flame flickered when it touched the damp moss that shielded the heart tree but persisted to touch the bare trunk with its golden tongues. The dry, course bark of the elderly tree hosted the fire as it crawled up the trunk like a staircase, binding the branches into the red conflagration and using them as stepping stones to climb higher.

In less than an hour's time, the heart tree, as well as its surrounding children, was completely engulfed in flame with no end to the devastation in sight.

A year later, the tip of a leaf burst through the ashes where the heart tree once stood tall. The shining, rubbery leaf unfolded, a tiny thing, no larger than the wing of a butterfly. It was the beginning of the forest's new heart tree. In a thousand years, maybe less, the forest would be at its full strength again, just as it was before the fire; only this time, it would be more beautiful, more magical than it ever was before.

Author's Note

Another one of my dry-spell stories. I don't even know with this one.... By this point, I was seriously worried I was going insane.