The Living Young Tree (2)

What must a Sacred Young Tree do?

Why did I choose to become a Sacred Young Tree in the first place?

I wanted to be a bridge between nature and people.

I want everyone to enjoy this forest draped in green, this beautiful nature that changes with the turning seasons. Just as I used to sit in my hospital bed and savor the little patch of nature outside my window, I hoped people could find joy in the small things too, and share that joy with one another.

But that's a hard wish to grant.

Nature does not exist to cater to human desire. The dense greenery turns to a suffocating darkness once night falls. A sudden downpour of dancing flowers and singing trees brings a bone-deep chill that makes the body shudder.

To humans, nature is a battleground, not a place of rest. Every small pleasure, every small happiness, is just one more little thing that struggle can sweep away.

But that's exactly why I want to say it.

Humans are part of nature — so doesn't nature share some responsibility for making them into beings so ill-suited to it?

Which means I think we're entitled to act a little spoiled here. Why doesn't nature bend to meet us? Why doesn't nature help us live our lives? It's an absurdly human-centered way of thinking, but humans were always like that, so nature ought to feel some obligation to answer, shouldn't it?

So let us ask the great wilderness for its indulgence.

May you be a little softer. May you be a little kinder. May you be a little more tender. May you be a little warmer.

As the Sacred Young Tree, I will wish this on humanity's behalf.

A vast will struck the forest like a bell tolling. Light surged upward and filled the sky.

Suddenly, an earthquake shook the entire village. The ground trembled, and cracks spread through the artificial buildings raised across the forest.

Wh-whoa?

The flustered elves scrambled outside in a hurry — and the earth heaved again, this time hard enough to bring the man-made structures crashing down.

Whoa, whoa, WHOAAA? Um, hold on a second.

Buildings began collapsing one by one across the whole village. Dust rose in clouds. One thunderous rumble followed another.

Okay, look, I'll admit I did think that sticking artificial buildings in the middle of a forest kind of ruined the scenery. So I can understand why an earthquake just came out of nowhere and smashed them all to pieces, like when the farm fields got forcibly rezoned. I get it, really.

An inn came down in a single, complete collapse.

......I get it, but still.

Borlidon and Dahlia, who had fled into the open, stood staring blankly at the inn's ruins alongside the rest of the Holy Kingdom delegation. Then they looked around at the village, where one building after another was crumbling.

When the great quake finally passed, people collapsed where they stood, crying out. No one got back up. They simply stared, hollow-eyed, at the scene of destruction.

...I suddenly want to cry.

Um, this IS something I can clean up after, right? This was a miracle tailored entirely to my personal tastes — it can't just end with an ugly pile of rubble. Right? Because if not, I really am going to cry.

Just then, the wood of the ruined inn responded. It was the timber they'd used in place of pillars, since the dense forest couldn't be clear-cut to supply them.

The tree began to grow at a furious pace. Its trunk widened horizontally, hollowing out from within to form an interior space — mimicking the inn's first floor. Branches spread along the ground-floor walls, forming an outdoor staircase, and the trunk climbed higher to create a second floor.

The tree was growing on its own, imitating the artificial.

Something artificial yet natural at once.

That would be a place where people no longer needed to struggle.

A living inn of wood stood bathed in sunlight.

"......"

Borlidon, still on his knees, gazed up at the tree inn in a daze. His massive frame shook — an trembling that had nothing to do with the earthquake.

All across the village, trees were rising from the wreckage of fallen buildings, taking the place of the man-made structures. Little by little, green was filling the village to its edges.

Phew. What a relief.

Ever since I became a Sacred Young Tree, I seem to keep causing incidents. Probably because pure nature has been made to hold human desire within it, my own desires get baked in far too strongly.

Before, it wouldn't have mattered so much. Now that my very scale had grown, even the smallest wish didn't stay small. It had always bothered him, faintly, that a quasi-city of a village had sprung up in the middle of the forest and buried the scenery under artificial buildings — but he'd never imagined a miracle would respond to so tiny a regret. Even after the forced rezoning of the farm fields had made him careful about what creating this Holy Land might unleash, he hadn't expected this.

Still, looking around, it seems no one got hurt. Thank goodness. Well — it was a miracle, after all.

Since he'd brought it up, he looked down at Borlidon. The priest was still staring blankly up at the tree inn.

So? Isn't this world far too beautiful to sum up and dismiss?

No answer came.

Looking closer, he wasn't dazed — his soul had simply left his body.

Ah. Yeah. That's fair, honestly.

I'll check in on him later.

Humans lived in the Forest of Serenity too.

There was no reason they shouldn't. The enormously large Elf Village was in the process of swallowing up the forest, but that was a recent development — this had always been human territory within the human kingdom.

The trouble was that surviving in a dense woodland where farming was all but impossible meant choosing a life unlike any ordinary one. That meant a life that was, in another sense, grindingly poor — and only those willing to accept that had ever put down roots here.

But once you actually settled in, the forest held more advantages than you'd expect.

There was a prejudice that humans living near the Elf Village would catch an arrow without doing anything wrong — that humans shouldn't come anywhere near the place.

It wasn't actually prejudice.

It was plain, unvarnished truth that the moment you ran into an elf while wandering the forest's edge, you'd find an arrow trained on you before anything else. A human resident crouched down gathering wild herbs, only for a notoriously ill-tempered elf to appear out of nowhere and point a bow at him, demanding what he thought he was doing in someone else's forest — that was just a routine occurrence.

In practice, though, that arrow was rarely ever loosed. The ones that flew would graze past your head at most; no elf had ever truly shot to kill.

Elves considered humans filthy creatures, yet even when they fired at someone who'd done nothing more than pick herbs, they surprisingly never crossed the line.

Once you set the prejudice halfway aside, the forest's genuine merits came into view. Because fearsome elves lived here, bandit gangs and mercenary companies were scarce. You could roam the forest's edge without special vigilance and run into nothing worse than equally impoverished human neighbors — never the lawless scum who could ruin your life.

Besides, tax collectors hated coming near the Elf Village just as much as anyone else did. So long as you avoided the rare collector passing to and from the village, you could live entirely free of tax worries.

And the days when these elves were truly dangerous were in the past. The village had grown so vast that not even slave traders dared touch it, and with that size had come peace of mind — now, even when they crossed paths, elves would only draw a bow, never loose one.

It had come to light that the reason elves aimed arrows at every human in sight was that slave traders had dragged the reputation of humankind through the mud. With the root cause more or less resolved, the Forest of Serenity — once nearly unlivable for humans because elves themselves were considered the problem — became a place where humans could more or less get by. Life was still harsh, and the elf neighbors remained prickly, but that was all.

So it was only natural that human settlers gradually increased.

And just as naturally, friction between elves and humans began to rise again.

Around the time the Young Tree resolved to proclaim a Holy Land before the Holy Kingdom's priest, out at the forest's edge, the settlers and the elves were in the full swing of an argument.

"So why exactly do we have to call the divine tree a 'Young Tree'?"

One human asked on behalf of the group.

"Because the Young Tree Himself ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠commanded it. How many times do I have to tell you before it gets through your head?"

A sardonic elf scowled. The shabby-looking settlers whispered among themselves behind him.

"Do you believe what that lunatic is saying?"

"They did say the elves out here had gone properly mad, and apparently that was accurate. I've never once in my life seen a tree that big — let alone a building that's a tree. What do they mean, 'young'?"

An elf ear twitched. The elves whipped around to glare at the humans.

"What did you say? You're living off the miracles the Young Tree bestows, and you mean to defy the honorific He chose with His own will?"

The humans flinched and lowered their whispers further.

"Feisty, for elves. Weren't they supposed to be on a walk? They should just keep walking. Why come over here and pick a fight?"

"Maybe harassing the 'easy' humans on the forest's edge with a ridiculous title is what they call a walk?"

"That's it exactly!"

Sadly, the misused honorific went uncorrected, and the two sides stayed on parallel tracks.

It was because the elven kind was, by nature, too fundamentally good-hearted to put an arrow through the heads of irreverent humans who ignored the honorific the Young Tree had decreed.

The elf who'd supposedly been out on a walk — having left her bow at home — ground her teeth.

"With that attitude, you won't last long in this forest. You'd best be prepared."

The humans, who were strictly squatters on the forest's edge themselves, flinched. They imagined this and that, then asked with trembling eyes:

"What are you going to do to us?"

The question caught the elf off guard instead.

The truth was, there was nothing she could do whether these rude humans used the honorific or not. These weren't armed thugs — killing them would just be murder.

"Well, that's......"

The elf hesitated. When no answer came, the humans belatedly caught on.

"Wait. There's nothing, is there?"

"Right? You're not going to kill us over this, are you? It's not like divine punishment is going to fall or anything. Whether we call it 'Young Tree' or not changes nothing. Let's just all call it the divine tree, the correct way!"

"Hear, hear! Let's do that! It's not as if anyone's lost their mind — what 'Young Tree'? It's simply a divine tree!"

The humans agreed, irreverently.

The elf trembled with fury, teeth clenched.

Are we really supposed to let an attitude this outrageously disrespectful slide?

Frankly, "divine tree" WAS correct — and she herself wanted to call it that. Or else "Sacred Tree."

Forgive me for saying so, Young Tree, but......

Truthfully, that was how most of the village elves felt.

The honorific He chose suits Him terribly. He seems to have no talent for naming things. I wish He'd take a good long look at Himself.

But the Young Tree insisted on His strange title, so everyone called Him by it under duress.

And yet — we elves were forced into it, so why do those humans get to call Him whatever they like, comfortably? They receive His miracles just like we do.

It's a colossal injustice.

The world bending itself around human convenience yet again — this cannot stand. If I can't call Him comfortably, those humans shouldn't get to ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠either.

Gritting her teeth, the elf prayed fervently to the Young Tree.

Please, please make those things call you Young Tree too. I don't want to be the only one forced to say it. Make the humans uncomfortable too!

That sincere heart was answered.

Light began to explode across the entire forest.

"Gwahk!"

The humans flailed in the light, shrieking.

"What's happening?!"

The devout elf realized her mistake in a flash.

"You called the honorific wrongly on your own authority, and the Young Tree is wrathful!"

"WHAT?!"

The instant the words left her mouth, an earthquake struck and the human crowd went down.

"Ghhk!"

The shanties nearby crumbled with a groan.

"Aaaagh!"

The shacks the settlers loved so well were never built around living trees, so no trees rose to rebuild them. Too artificial, they were simply wiped away.

"Oh! O Young Tree! We have sinned! Please quench your wrath!"

The humans repented their wrongs and dutifully used ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the uncomfortable honorific.

The elf covered her mouth, moved to tears.

Now I'm not the only one who's uncomfortable.

Her heart brimming, the elf set off running joyfully through the forest — to find every last human who hadn't yet grasped the situation and correct their honorifics too.

At last, the world had grown one step fairer.