The forest had a pulse. Mira had known this since childhood, the way one knows things that adults insist are metaphor — known it in her chest when she pressed her ear to the bark of the eldest oak, known it in her palms when she dug her fingers into soil that had never been turned. But the pulse had quickened in the last three seasons, and now even her grandmother, who had spent sixty years calling Mira fanciful, would not walk beneath the canopy past dusk.
The spirits of the Verdant Sea did not have names, not ones they shared. They were old enough to predate naming, old enough to remember when the continent had been warm water and the first green things were just learning the light. Mira had met one, once, in the form it chose to show her — something between a deer and the idea of patience, moving with a stillness that occupied space without disturbing it. It had looked at her for a long time. Then it had shown her something she was still trying to understand three years later.
She carried the memory the way one carries a stone found at the bottom of a river: smooth, unremarkable to look at, heavier than it had any right to be. The forest's pulse was quickening because something was dying. Not a tree, not a creature. Something that had no body, only presence — something that had been here before the first humans had looked up at these branches and decided to call them home. Mira was twenty-four years old and she did not know how to mourn a god.
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