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"Yes..."

You sniffle, apprehensively.

Ever so slowly, ever so gently, roots reach up from the ground and encase you. One wraps around your eyes. Thick branches pin your arms to your sides. The mass of roots gently binds and immobilizes you. You resist the urge to struggle, and though you are not in control of your fate, you feel nothing sinister from the roots.

You can see nothing, but you feel slow movement. After a short time or a long time, it's hard to tell which, the root wrapped over your eyes comes away. In fact, you can no longer feel any individual roots touching you, though you are still firmly encased in wood.

You open your eyes, but instead of seeing, you feel. You feel the wind rustling your leaves. You feel the late afternoon sun, tasty. You feel the soil all the way down to bedrock. Your roots intermingle with the roots of the trees nearest you, and through them you can feel their neighbors. You can feel all the trees in this forest, until...

Dead, as if a limb has been chopped off. There's still a sense of the tree that was there, a phantom pain, as it were. And everything pulls you down once you realize. There aren't only dead trees at the edges, but the ones in the interior are different. You can feel where there was once a tree, but instead of phantom pain, you feel growth and life and movement. Newness sprouts from decay. The soil wriggles with potato bugs and worms. Pollinators nest in dried trunks.

But at the edges, there is no life. There is hopelessness, a deep sense of an incapacity for action. You can grow and spread life, but not so quickly as that. You sense something wrong in some of the other trees in the forest. The breeze that blows through is not kind. It has worse than dirt in it. Something makes trees, trees who do not feel feelings FEEL. You know hopelessness and sorrow, but some of these trees know anger. Some of these trees embrace parasites and grow thorns, and relish the idea that they could hurt whoever or whatever is cutting off their neighbors at the root.

It hurts deep in your heartwood to know that this is not the way the world should be.

"How can I help?" You think, and with that, you feel free to move again. You climb through malleable wood, and out of the trunk, finding yourself twenty feet up and looking out at the green forest on the other side of the lake.

"You have to change things," says the dryad, "I'll help you, but I don't understand how things work in your world. I don't understand how humans can destroy the world so casually and callously."

"Do you have a name?" you ask.

"I barely know what that means," it responds.

"It's something I can call you, so that you know I'm speaking to you alone."

"Call me whatever you want. Give me a name, if you need to," says the thorny magical wood creature.