"The Grove": the finale

She let herself drop to the ground, the bottom of the hollow, but not the bottom of the hole, for now she saw that just a step away from where she had been standing, the ground fell away, steeply. Runa inhaled sharply, with the delayed realisation that she could have tumbled all the way down… and as she cautiously moved toward the edge of the deeper well she sensed rather than saw that the well sank as if into the heart of the earth. She was about to push herself as far away from that gaping absence as she could, her mind scampering into the unthought-out stupidity of her position, for how was she ever to get out? And what if she had fallen deeper… and… and… but her panic was shocked into submission by a silvery flickering all up the sides of the hollow and, yes, all down the walls of the well. It was like the trails of snails on a sunlit tree trunk… but they were moving, she was sure of it.

“Yes!”

Yes, they were moving. And they were forming… what looked like… a ladder?

The whispers she’d heard when she first descended into the hollow, but had become too distracted to attend, were suddenly loud in Runa’s ears. It was grief that was both deafening and at a distance. She sensed in the midst of the hollowness a hard clenched centre of pain. As though all that should be spread and stretching were bound into a tight ball, anguished and afraid. Her own heart matched the sensations and she started climbing down into the heart of the hollow, legs and hands stepping on a ladder of mycelium and moonlight.

Down, and down some more. Deeper than ever the Heeders had dug. The well had yawned open, a mouth of silent screams, as the land was turned from relation to resource.

The world had grown too loud for the delicate connections of communion between beings. The first listeners, so attuned the modest needs of all the vast company of living ones, had lost the ability to distinguish unheralded voices beneath the human racket. And there was so much sorrow! So much pain! And so often they were severed, sliced, dissected and extracted. Instead of the delicate offerings of the Heeders, whose stories allowed human lives to remain entangled in the web of the land, there was just this constant commotion, these incessant demands…

Runa understood the need for retreat. She felt in her deepest self the yet deeper need for a kind of peace, the peace that allows you to listen to the quietest things. For the quietest things can be immense, just as the smallest birds can have the biggest voices.

She was, at last, at the bottom. The moon, strangely, was still immediately above the opening, but now it was small and far away. She stood in the deafening silence, the cacophonous quiet, and waited, lit in the centre of the land’s dark heart.

It was there that the story of the place came to her, as a scent in the damp air, indescribable but unique. When the mycorrhizal elders had withdrawn back into their secret birthplace, the world began to lose its inner memories, its routes of trade and exchange. Without the tracks made by hyphae, the land’s collaborative intelligence dimmed. And without the porosity provided by pathways from air to earth, the world hardened into impermeability.  Young trees lost their tutors, birdsong flattened into dullness, floods and droughts and disease increased. Mycelium had turned glaciated deserts into dwellings and now the potential for dwelling was being destroyed.

“Look down.”

She did, and knelt to examine what she could barely see. A stone carved into the likeness of a badger.  A rock glittering with metallic ore. Many fragments of wood, which may have been shaped or bound, but were now little more than fibres. The white skull of a hawk. A smooth pebble with a hole passing through it. A slate cared with geometric designs. A bead of amber, warm to her touch.

“You may keep that.”

She put it in her pocket and stood up, waiting for what would happen next.

A single drop of water fell, slow, too slow, passing in front of her face, a falling star aflame in the moonlight.

She watched it soak into the soil at her feet.

And in that moment, she knew that she must speak a truth she had never spoken aloud. Something she had hidden even from herself. The grove, the hollow, the land were not demanding it from her. But the withdrawal could not be reversed without it. Not because it was payment, or punishment, but because truth is the only thing quiet enough to be heard.

“I am sprung-born,” she said. “Sprung from the soil. Not special in that, but fortunate only in that I feel it, my bond with more than humans. And what it has taught me is this, my one truth, and that truth is this: I am uncertain, dependent, vulnerable, and unfinished. I am a child of the land, always, for you are the elder. I cannot dominate or force or determine. All I can do is listen, and learn, and love, and give myself back to you, with gratitude, at my dying. To heal what we have harmed, we need to heed the heart of the land. I hear you. I hear you. I hear you.”

Runa felt the land breathe around her. Hyphal filaments glowed and the whispering voices were falling into a kind of rhythm. But she knew this could never be enough. It was a salve not a solution.

“What am I to do?” she asked.

There, before her, the ladder gleamed. She accepted the invitation and climbed, from the well into the hollow, from the hollow to the fallen limb of the ancient oak.

And when Runa emerged, damp, thoughtful, troubled, there was the fox. Sitting up, head cocked and ears pricked. And he bowed his head before her.

“Oh, Fox,” she said, “I followed what had withdrawn and acknowledged it. But that feels like it is only the start. I don’t merit your thanks. Not yet.”

He blinked, once, and slowly, then jumped down into the clearing, where before he would not place his foot. Runa followed. She stood in the centre of a place that felt like a promise, as the moon recommenced its arc across the sky.

They sat together, surrounded by the sleeping birds, watching as the barn owl made one sweep from south to north and the bats flickered like the ghosts of stars in their hunt for moths. Runa lay back, her hands clasped beneath her head, listening, holding warmth, accepting equivocation.

The world is changed, she thought. And it cannot return to what it once was. But it can, surely, grow into a shape that welcomes all rather than denying most. We can reverse the un-tending. Or, at least, I can.

The fox huffed in agreement.

“Yes!” said the hare in her head.

And Runa fell asleep.

When she woke, the sun had not yet risen. The air was heavy with dew. A chill on her face and feet, but she felt a furred warmth to her left and around her head. She pushed herself up slowly. The fox eyed her, nose masked by the May blossom whiteness of his tail. He had been at her side. She turned to see where her head had rested. There, ears flat on her back, the hare, who did not need to turn her head to acknowledge Runa’s surprise.

Am I changed, she asked herself, wondering if she had somehow developed a kind of magic or power that would help her influence the farmers and the hunters, the builders and the miners. What can I do? An outcast, without kith or kin? I am just one insignificant woman.

The wren started to sing, his clear voice parting the pre-dawn quiet as the sun’s rays part clouds.

“I know, Little Winter King. I did not forget… And no,” she said, laughing, as the robin’s voice alternated with the wren’s, “I did not forget the lesson of gentle courage either.” The blackbird, perched, she saw, deep in a tangle of hawthorns, offered his undersong, the constant and creative flow of music in which these darkling creatures test their most audaciously woven melodies. “Of course, my friend,” said Runa, “I recall that the light and the darkness, life and death, delight and despair, and always bound together in the enfolding of the world. You have all three been wise teachers, and I thank you,”

The hare stood and stretched like a cat. Her body had left a hollow in the grass and leaflitter, a small depression shaped by warmth and sleep. Runa’s hands flew to her own head. Was there a hollow inside her too?

No. Just as the land was holding the imprint of the hare’s rest, Runa’s mind held the trace of its presence—not an emptiness, but a shaping.

Amber might trap an ancient insect, preserved but powerless, but land and mind were not amber: they held living memory, a memory that could move, a memory that could change things. Even after death and decay, those memories—those small stores of love—could tilt the course of other lives, nourishing them, redirecting them, teaching them how to begin again.

The fox stood with slow, deliberate grace, every movement a decision. Where he had been lying there was no hollow at all—only a faint disturbance in the leaflitter, as if the world had hesitated there for a moment and then moved on.

Runa felt a prickle across her shoulders. If the hare left its soft impression as guidance, the fox left a question. She touched her chest. Was there a similar disturbance inside her—a place where something agile and watchful had paused, then slipped deeper in?

Yes. But fox-trace was not warmth or shape. It was more slant-wise than that. A shift in how the world tilted. A subtle readjustment of perspective, like noticing a hidden path only when you turn your head just so. Fox memories are metamorphic memories––quiet as a thought one has not admitted yet, cunning as a truth glimpsed sideways. Even after absence and silence, that fox-trace would linger: a small, bright streak of knowing that could turn danger into possibility, confusion into direction, a closed way into a narrow, necessary opening.

“I need to teach someone,” Runa said, though the idea felt as if it had reached her from elsewhere. “The medicines will be lost if I don’t. If we remember that the land heals us first… maybe we will stop wounding the land in return.”

The fox and the hare regarded her with their inscrutable, steady eyes. Above them the birds sang, turn-taking, jewel-bright notes. The fallen oak—half dead, half alive, wholly transformed— leaned protectively over the young grove it had birthed, sheltering the clearing and the well beneath.

For the first time, Runa focused her mind on the tree, resting her hand on its bark. Before there was a well, the tree stood. The oak had been the message the Heeders had heeded, turning their steps toward this spot halfway up a rolling hill. Its presence, sun-eating and earth-moving, had provided the catalyst for an ever-growing increasingly diverse community––fungi and insects and plants and birds and animals. The long-lived being who brought air and light to land and water. Transferring and transforming. Terraforming. Now, fallen, it was the message again.

“I see,” she whispered. “You hold the promise as well as the memories. I will hold my promise too.”

A faint tremor passed through the soil beneath her feet—the kind of movement roots make, or something deeper, older, responding. For a breathless moment the clearing brightened, though no cloud had moved and no breeze had stirred the leaves. Runa felt the air recede and return, as if the grove had taken her words and turned them into heartwood.