The Pandendron
As told by a fisherman to Serenade
I do not know who sent the storm against my little fishing boat. I do not know why it sent my unconscious body safe among the sharp rocks of the sea until it pitched up upon that islet. I do know I would have died without the priest to pull me out of the tides and to warm me by the fire.
His hut was stones, just stones with the cracks and gaps plugged by mud. He used only dried grasses in his fire, and his knife was flint and bone. He used no wood, no wood at all.
His care and his joy was the Pandendron, what was once an Ancestor, a powerful being that had tired of the strife and blood of all the bestial creatures of the world, and had made herself wood. All the trees of the world were honoured, and made petition that she should become one of their kind.
She secured a promise from each kind of tree, and then, for her part, became a tree that grew a leaf from every kind of tree she had bargained with.
Nobody knows what those promises were.
In time, I healed, and was finally presented to the Pandendron itself. The priest was old, and his flesh had grown thin and grey. He hoped I should become the priest after him. I looked upon the Pandendron, saw the sunlight fall through a thousand shades of green and felt it dapple my face. I could not help but touch her trunk in reverence.
I should have cut my arm off first. I am of the fae, and as soon as my glamour touched the tree, nothing stood before us but an old rotted stump. The glorious Pandendron had died long since, by fire or lightning or time, and some kindly former priest had woven a glamour as a monument to it's glory. Be sure it was not the current caretaker, for the shock took the last of his health, and his heart failed even as he fell.
I spent a year and a day there, using lesser woods to make my boat, carving my own monument to the fallen Ancestor, out of coloured muds. And that is the tale.
All Works are © Original Author
(OC Author - Ni Claydon)