The Trembling Giant

There’s nothing to fear about these woods, my boy. For all their creaking, rustling, rasping watchfulness, they’re just trees. Fact is, these woods here are all one big tree really, a single set of roots, a creature of immense size, of mind-boggling age and experience. These trunks just the upthrust outgrowth of a being that was already ancient when our ancestors started working flint and worshipping the wind. 

So what possible interest could we be to it, with our mayfly eye-blink existences, here and gone in less time than it takes a single, slow thought to travel from one end of its body to the other?

How petty we must seem, in our wormlike wrigglings, fit only to fertilize the ground upon which it feeds. Over the millennia so many must have died beneath these branches, between these roots, died and decomposed and been drawn up, into its body—why, the thing must be half-human itself already. With human needs. And hungers. 

It would be an honor, really, to wet this meadow with our blood, and so become part of something ageless, immortal.

You understand now why I brought you here?

So shut your eyes, my boy, and shhh. There’s nothing to be scared of. Nothing at all. 

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Inspired by Pando, one of, if not THE world's oldest living organisms.