Again, Astra woke to ashes. Cinders cascaded from her face and shoulders, wrapping her in an aura of dust. She coughed, and her chest felt like a spent piece of charcoal about to crumble. The smell of old fire clogged her nose and gritty remnants grated her eyes when she blinked. The same feeling every morning, one that eventually passed, but each new day held the possibility that the burning would finally take hold and devour what little was left of her.

Between leaves, deep violets were already erasing the stars. Wind whispered in the leaves, and Astra made her way from her bed of moss on unsteady limbs hollowed by the memory of fire. Each movement sent fragments of her skin flaking off as ash. She struggled up the roots and leaned heavily on the old oak’s trunk. She pressed her palm against the contours and let her fingers trace familiar crevices. She breathed in the scent of the moss, of the bark, of the leaves, and the earth beneath her feet. Slowly, the smell of smoke cleared from her nose and her breath came more easily. Solidified, she rubbed against the coarse bark, the rugged texture scraping down to her true skin.

“Thank you,” she whispered in the language of wind and leaf when her tongue was no longer brittle and cracked. “For your energy. For your faith.”

She lingered by the oak, the first tree that had trusted her as she came into the forest stinking of flame and destruction. That trust had lent her the strength to slowly purge the damage she had done from her body and begin the long work to find her path through nature again. But scars remained: even devoid of ash, her hair was still charred to swirls of blacks and grays, and gone, possibly forever, were the mingling autumnal strands that had emerged as she had become more powerful.

Astra hefted a basket woven from river grasses she’d filled with soil from the forest floor the night before. The weight almost pulled her back, and though she felt whole again, the pressure at her shoulders reminded her that her core was still charred and any moment she might snap and her arms collapse as soot. Leaning heavily on a gnarled walking stick, she set off through the dawn light, stepping lightly among the protruding roots of the oak and downhill through the forest.

The undergrowth nearest the oak had come to accept her, and she passed through them feeling their auras brush against her as once she had felt from every part of her old forest. Elderberry bushes. Black raspberry. Fern and aster. She skimmed their energy for what was to come, carrying it in her lungs. Squirrel darted from shoulder to shoulder, watching into the forest as they passed.

Beyond the oak’s influence, the forest still only sensed that she had carried fire in her heart. That once she had burned so strongly with the desire for revenge she had forgotten her oaths, her promises to be nature’s protector. The plants hushed when she passed and the smaller animals scurried away and cowered in the underbrush.

Squirrel chirped in her ear.

“In time,” Astra said. “It is fair for them to distrust me.” She eased herself over a fallen log. “When you have made a grave mistake as I have, one must struggle for a long time before the world finds again the trust it once had in you.” She reached up for Squirrel to nuzzle her finger. “But I doubt you will ever need to worry about that, little one. You live far too honestly to ever need such atonement.”

Beneath birdsong and the whisper of leaves, the endless murmur of the river guided her. She followed a narrow deer path that led straight to where the treeline stopped, thick willow roots bursting from the bank and plunging into the water. Across the river, the rising sun spread its fingers across the land unmitigated. A field of tree stumps stretched out, where forest had once spread over several hills and down into a valley. Now, even the grass had been trampled under by the loggers and the soil turned into dry, swirling dust.

This was the land of silence, where the voices of the forest and all the life within had been truncated, leaving only the empty wind through empty sky.

Astra lingered at the edge of the treeline, halfway between shadow and full, unabated light.

“It will take time,” she said to Squirrel. “As all things do. And perhaps in time I will find my way again.” She leaned on her walking stick and stepped into the sunlight and down the bank to where a hollowed out log was lodged among the roots. She set her basket inside, dislodged it from the roots, and retrieved her long branch for a barge pole. 

When the canoe reached the other bank and she stepped onto the ruined land, she was enveloped by the silence that had come to fill her days. Days that used to overflow with the myriad languages of plants and creatures. 

But then she had become blinded by vengeance. Years of watching civilization creep into the forests, she’d sought to push them back with the same violence with which they encroached. Her forest, ancient and content, had given its power for nourishment, for growth, but she had twisted it into flame, forced it into destruction and devastation. And in the end, the forest had taken her magic from her and left her unable to hear the plants for the first time in her life. Where before she was a trusted guardian, nature shunned her as it would a spirit of endless death.

The oak had taken pity on her and, wise in its old age, had seen that she sought atonement. It opened its voice to her and she found tranquility in its ancient murmurings, the first soothing balm she’d felt since searing herself and being cast into silence.

“When I was young,” she told Squirrel, “I wanted to coax every acorn into a massive, ancient oak. To prod every pine to new heights. To see beech and spruce so sturdy that even nature’s fiercest storms would be nothing more than a caress and a way to sate their thirst.”

She lowered her basket to the ground beside her and scooped out a thick handful of heavy humus. It smelled of life, and was crumbly and damp between her fingers. As she spread it across the ground around the stump, she said, “But I was fortunate enough to have a mentor. A wise woman so old she had almost become the forest herself. Her hair was leaves and her skin moss.” The black patch grew and Astra continued spreading the soil from the forest around the roots. The ends of worms wriggled exposed for a moment before vanishing again.

She lowered herself down until her cheek grazed the dirt. “And she showed me that caring for a forest is more than caring for the oldest trees. More than whispering hyacinths into bloom.”

“First, the soil needs to eat,” she told Squirrel. She brushed her fingers against the spongy undercoats of the mushrooms, feeling their firmness and their solid connection to the stump. “In time, all this death recycles into life. A forest that burns leaves ash which will nourish the new plants.”

Astra dug her hand into the dusty dirt and mixed it with the last of the humus from her basket. “First, you start with the soil.” She spread her mixture so that the stump was surrounded by a layer of fertile earth. “Then, the grass and the worms.” She breathed magic into the dark patch and tiny buds of grass pushed up between clumps. “From this, the insects will return. Then the birds. Then the trees.”

The buds trembled in the wind, lost their minuscule shadows in the dark earth.

Atonement, she had come to realize, was not going to come with a flourish of redemption washing across the land. Her old magic was gone, and there would be no growing an oak from an acorn overnight. It would be in seedlings and soils, in tender care for the plants and animals. It would be through beetles and flies.

She would fill the silence of her days with work until this land that had once whispered in the wind would whisper again. In time, the forest and the animals would see that she was there to aid them. She would remember what it meant to be the guardian of a forest, and through that selflessness, they would trust her again.

Squirrel squeaked and leapt from her shoulder onto the stump. He darted back and forth, looking at the mushrooms that hadn’t been there a moment ago.

Astra pushed herself up, leaning heavily on her staff. Without the oak’s magic, the brittleness of charcoal was in her lungs again. The field of cut trees seemed too vast on this side of the river. But she would reclaim this land, one line of grass at a time. And one day when there were cricket songs at night and the hooting of owls and the rustle of mice beneath fallen leaves, when the first deer returned and watched as she passed by, laden with seeds to expand the forest beyond its original border, she knew that she would have a place where she belonged, again. Like she had once before. Before she’d lost her way.

She started off, and Squirrel scampered after her, darting ahead and then waiting on a trunk until she passed. The wind blew, kicking up dust. But soon the soil would be heavy with potential, and life would return to the land. It would just take time and effort.