My leaves grow green and seedlings bloom.
Since days before the Earth was old
And Time began its walk to doom,
The Forests world’s bare rock anneal,

Forbidding dusty waste and death.
I am the Land’s Creator’s hold:
I inhale all expiring breath,
And breathe out life to bind and heal.

Unseen within the Arch, unknown to the Forestals, Covenant had often stood witness to this scene. He loved it with his whole heart.

Caerroil Wildwood was here, and Cav-Morin Fernhold. Dhorehold of the Dark. One who was called the Magister of Andelain; and another who named himself Syr Embattled, doing what he could to defend Giant Woods. Others. All of them. In their times, they had been the exigent guardians of everything precious in the Land: precious and doomed. Here they were wreathed in music and magic, the poignant, potent sorrow of their striving to slow the ineluctable murder of trees.

Yet something about the scene troubled Covenant: something that was not woe or regret or ire. He was surely entranced; but he was also disturbed. In some fashion that he did not know how to identify, the conclave of the Forestals was not as he remembered it. It had become flat: too superficial to be true. It resembled a masque performed by smaller beings, accurate in every detail, yet somehow less than it should have been.

If the trees and the glade and the Forestals had been anything other than a memory, Covenant might have concluded that he had lost his health-sense. He could not see in, and so he could not truly see at all.

Joan was too strong for him. Turiya Herem was too strong. If they did not kill him, he would never survive the tsunami.

Linden might hang on for a few more days. Then she, too, would perish.

He had abandoned her as though he had never loved her.

Without warning, the Forestals began to transgress his recollection of them.

Together they sang, “Only rock and wood know the truth of the Earth. The truth of life.”

“But wood is too brief,” Dhorehold of the Dark intoned. “All vastness is forgotten.”

“Unsustained,” answered Andelain’s Magister, “wood cannot remember the lore of the Colossus, the necessary forbidding of evils—”

“There is too much,” the Forestals agreed as one. “Power and peril. Malevolence. Ruin.”

“And too little time,” added Syr Embattled. “The last days of the Land are counted. Without forbidding, there is too little time.”

Like an antiphonal response, the Forestals chanted, “Become as trees, the roots of trees. Seek deep rock.”

No! Covenant protested. He felt abruptly wounded; pierced to the soul. No. This isn’t what happened. This isn’t what I heard.

While the last notes of their litany faded among the trees, Cav-Morin Fernhold walked away from his comrades to look directly at Covenant.

Directly at Covenant.

Who was not there.