The song was beautiful beyond imagination, but now he began to sing it in a minor key. He sang of rebellion and betrayal, of the chasm and blood and suffering and death. The same song that had drawn me to him made me cringe and back away from him who was both the singer and the song.

Another man came walking toward us, singing another song I’d also heard on the road. He was tall and bearded with dark red hair, very handsome, his chest bare, showing chiseled pectorals and biceps. His voice was soothing, almost intoxicating. He looked down at the shorter Woodsman and said, “I have a better song for you. Sing a song of pleasure. Eat the fresh bread. Can’t you smell it?”

The Woodsman shook his head.

“Sing a song of possessions; I’ll give you the wealth of kingdoms, the finest treasures of Skiathuros.”

He shook his head again, eyes burning with resolve.

“Sing a song of power; throw yourself from the mountaintop and command the warriors to catch you.”

He shook his head a third time. “I will not sing your song, Pretender,” said the Woodsman. “Not now. Not ever.”

“Then you will pay the price,” the handsome one said through clenched teeth, grinding out the words. At that moment a wave of heat made his plastic face buckle, melting the ice of his eyes. Shark eyes.

The handsome man departed, and the Woodsman began singing his song again. It was very intimate, not a performance, but a serenade, as if he sang just to me. He kept returning to the line, “I come to you so that you can come to me.”

The song was so familiar, as if it had been sung within me all my life, but I could never identify the words until now. All my life on earth, and all my time in this new world, I’d been longing to hear that song, to understand it … to sing it.

Still, something held me back from the Woodsman. He looked so rough, ferocious, untamed, and untamable. His dark yet white-hot eyes were wild—they hit me like a boxer’s blows, swift and relentless. And when he sang in a minor key those terrible words … I could not bear to hear it. I backed away from him, intrigued yet wary, doing battle with myself about who this really was and what claim he might have on me.

The Woodsman walked up to the scroll, put his hands upon it, and opened it effortlessly. He read from it as if it were his autobiography. “I made the worlds, I made the image-bearers, I became one of them to fix them and all they have broken.”

He rolled up the scroll, and as his hand let go, the scroll turned hard as bronze.