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If there was a word for someone who had so much reverence for the natural world it was nearly a religion, that word applied to Ashton. Rare was the day that didn’t find him out exploring the undeveloped land around his home, wandering for hours even at the expense of his studies and social life. Nothing else mattered so long as he could feel the sun on his skin and smell the life all around him. Sometimes it felt like nature itself was his companion on those afternoon jaunts. The sun in rustling leaves was the face of his companion, and the babbling of streams her voice.

Of course, he was uniquely placed for such a life, high in the wilderness of Northern California. There were less than a thousand other people in the “city” he lived in, and a good half of them (including his parents) were too high or drunk to be aware of anything outside of themselves. The other half worked in the metal foundry that was the only reason the town existed, living from paycheck to paycheck out of slowly rotting mobile homes. Ashton didn’t mind that he was the only student in his year in school, or that the school only had four teachers. He didn’t mind that there were so few other humans around that there was nobody his own age to talk to. This meant more time for wandering the wilderness, which he knew much better than the single Ranger assigned to patrol it.

Today was different than usual. For the first time in what felt like years, Ashton had stumbled into a part of the local forest he didn’t recognize. It was in a valley, a valley with walls steep enough that he couldn’t see landmarks anymore. But then, he almost didn’t want to.

The valley was beautiful. Never in his life had Ashton seen a forest so healthy. Every shrub, every bush, every flower seemed perfect to him, as though he were actually inside a gigantic arboretum. Yet there was nothing artificial about it. It was precisely because of the irregularities that everything seemed so perfect to his eyes. Suddenly Ashton found himself feeling he was in a sacred space, and he immediately dropped down to remove his hiking boots and thick socks, carrying them in his arms as the garden rose higher and higher around him with every step.

Ashton wasn’t much to look at, and he felt somehow inadequate to be in a place like this, as though his presence itself was somehow sullying the ground. He was an average kid, nearly seventeen now, and one of those faces that would blend into a crowd and never provoke a second glance. His hair and eyes were both brown, like the bark of an oak tree. His clothes too were unremarkable. Patchwork jeans and a sweat-soaked tee-shirt seemed inadequate for this garden. Yet what could he do, turn around? It wasn’t as though he had anything nicer at home. Since food-stamp day wasn’t for another three days, there wouldn’t even be canned soup waiting back there.

It felt like hours before he reached the center of the magnificent little patch of woodland, though he knew there were no stretches of forest that large that would be unfamiliar to him anywhere near where he could’ve ended up. This was a little frightening, but the wonder of the place more than made up for that. He discovered several crystal streams trickling through the wood, and followed one to a large pond in the center.

Resting just a few feet away from the pond, was the most spectacular tree he had ever seen. He did not recognize the species, which was saying a great deal since he knew every tree that grew in California. It was easily as large as a Giant Sequoia, but with a round full shape like an oak. Thousands of branches grew around it, a seventy-five foot sphere of green that seemed almost to glow in the fire of late afternoon. Ashton smiled, nodded respectfully to the gigantic tree, then sat down with his back against the trunk, resting his bare feet in the water of the pond and smiling in absolute contentment. No matter how bad life was at home, nothing could distract from this perfect moment. Nothing.

What happened next was not speaking. It was wrong to call the faint rustle of leaves in the breeze a voice. He heard no words, not as ordinary people might hear them. It was more like he felt the great tree, felt the intention in the way a single leaf still green fell from the branches above him and landed in his lap. ‘You could stay forever,’ the tree was saying. ‘You have nothing to return to. This garden would be brighter with you in it.’

Ashton caught the leaf between his fingers and smiled sadly, looking up the trunk towards the distant sunlight. Sitting against the tree, he felt almost as though his own feelings were superseded by those of the massive living thing. He was so small against the bark, so fragile. Humans lived so short compared to these great trees, so short they could scarcely live long enough to appreciate life as the trees did. They did not live long enough to appreciate the art they made with their leaves in the autumn, causing them to fall just so. They could not watch as the landscape changed around them, as hills rose and flattened and new species of animals colonized an area and old ones were wiped out. Even lesser trees were fleeting beings, come and gone in a blink.

“I bet you were here before the Egyptians were building pyramids,” he said to the tree, closing his eyes. Ashton didn’t know if trees could actually live that long, but looking up at this one looking so solid, so real, it was hard not to think of it as the strength and the rocks and mountains around them as the weakness.

‘You are one of our children,’ he imagined he could hear the tree answer. ‘We sheltered you in our branches, and one day you left us. We had been your mothers and you became our enemy, burning fires of our flesh.’

Maybe the tree couldn’t really talk, but Ashton could. “Not me!” he insisted. “I would never hurt the forest! I’ve never hurt a tree, or an animal, not ever.” Unless you counted all the meat he ate, but you didn’t get to be picky when the state paid your meals. Besides, he hadn’t been the one to actually kill the cows and chickens that he ate, so it still counted didn’t it? Those animals were domesticated; it wasn’t the same as hurting the trees.

‘You wouldn’t have found your way here otherwise,’ the wind and the branches seemed to say. ’You should stay. Stay long enough to watch the age of men end around us.’

“I can’t.” He moved a little away from the tree, dipping his hands in the cool water of the pond. It was a very slow conversation, on the order of several minutes to hear everything the tree said. He wasn’t really hearing, merely interpreting what the tree was feeling at him. That didn’t make sense. How was he suddenly able to talk to the tree? He sometimes imagined he could feel the joy of the living world around him, but never anything else. Certainly not complex concepts. Was he losing his mind? Still, he was so entranced by everything around him that he couldn’t bear the thought of leaving. What if he could never find his way back again? Nothing he had ever seen had ever been like this garden. He wasn’t sure anything in the world could be so worthwhile. If the trees could talk here, so much the better. “Even if I could find food to eat and water to drink, I would freeze to death when winter comes. I would have no clothes to wear, and wild animals would attack me when I finally got weak from hunger.” He shook his head. “I can’t stay here.”

‘Not as you are,’ said the silent voice of the tree. ‘But I could make so much more of you. Flesh that wouldn’t feel the cold or the wind or the rain. Flesh that would not turn to dust with the rest of your age. I have given this gift before, and I can again. The forest will provide for you, and teach you all it knows. With time and patience you will learn to speak to the sleeping trees and learn all they know. It is the life you long for. It is the only life that will bring you peace.’

Now Ashton felt a little real fear. Maybe everything that he had thought he felt from the great tree had been his own imagination before. But in this latest promise there were only two possibilities open. Either he was insane, and actively hallucinating now, or the tree really was speaking to him and offering to grant every dream he had ever had. Health to survive the fiercest wilderness, and permission to make this eden his home. Of course, it seemed far more likely this was just an elaborate hallucination. It did seem to know what he was thinking, right down to his deepest desires. It had to be in his imagination. But then if it was, what did he really have to lose? Hallucinations couldn’t grant wishes.

“What do I have to do?” he asked, doing his best to keep the eagerness from his voice. “I don’t think it’s possible, but if it is, then there’s nothing I would want more in the whole world. There’s nothing for me to go back to.”

The tree didn’t say anything for a long time, but it seemed to feel satisfied around him. It drew in all its branches a little, and seemed to lean just slightly toward him in a wind that wasn’t there. It was a little frightening, but not enough that he would move away. Could any of what he thought he was experiencing be real? He pinched himself, and found the pain as real as ever. Wasn’t that supposed to not hurt if you were having a trip? Or was that dreaming? He didn’t actually know.

‘Remove what you are wearing, and wait until the moon is on the water. Submerge yourself, and drink as much as you can before you surface. My strength will flow into you, child of the forest, and you will remain with me until the mightiest cities of men have rusted and crumbled to nothing.’

This was a frightening instruction for a number of reasons. For one, this forest had numerous predators. Bobcats, which usually didn’t attack adults. Bears, even a small wolf population somewhere in these mountains that had been introduced by the conservation people a few years ago. Beyond that, he was already lost. Who was to say if he would be able to find his way back in the dark. It was going to be a full moon, but that didn’t account for the fierce drops and dangerous trails he would have to traverse to make it home again. Really, he ought to turn back now. To say nothing of the fact that the instructions the tree was giving him just begged him to get gutworms or something from drinking the water unboiled. Even the water in such a pristine place might be foul for one reason or another.

The real reason Ashton decided to try was not because of the eternal life, or even because he would be able to stay in this forest forever. No, ultimately he said yes because the tree had done what his parents never had; it had called him its child. In life Ashton had no real friends, and rarely were either of his parents sober enough to drive. Maybe fate had conspired to give him a new family. A family of trees and flowers and foxes and rabbits and mice.

It got cold in the mountains at night, particularly on a windy night like tonight. This wind seemed particularly focused, as though the trees all around him were using it to express their anticipation, their eagerness for what was to follow. He removed his shirt and his jeans and his boxers, folding them neatly at the base of the tree beside his hiking boots and shivering as he walked naked towards the pond. Yet before he had completely turned away, he watched something that caused his heart to start violently in his chest. What he saw looked exactly like watching one of those time-lapse videos, only it happened in real time. Moss and leaves and likens crept up the cotton of his clothes, creepers spreading through the shirt and jeans like they were fresh soil. He watched with utter astonishment as they broke apart, drunk in by a rapidly growing bush covered in tiny white flowers. The boots faired a little better, since the plastic resin and epoxy-impregnated fabric resisted plants far better than cotton. Still the bush swallowed them, not consuming them so much as growing around them. The laces and some of the decoration fabric that were ordinary cloth crumbled away, leaving only the soles and part of the sides as the bush grew taller and taller, nearly half his height.

It was a message, even if there were no words. It said “you’ve made your choice, no going back now.” He wondered what the tree was going to do that he wouldn’t want those clothes anymore. Even living in the forest he would want something to wear, right? But he couldn’t ask the tree now. Time worked differently for trees than it did for fast-moving life, and if he waited for the tree to answer it would be too late. No, he would just have to trust that the one who had called him its child would take care of him.

The water had been pleasant in the heat of the day, but now it made his body shiver and his teeth rattle. Snow runoff at altitude had a way of sucking the life out of you, and that was exactly what he felt like as he waded into the deepest part of the little pond, up to his waist. He paused for one last second before he ducked under the surface, wondering if this whole elaborate hallucination was some vaguely masked form of deeply buried suicidal thoughts. Maybe he hated his life so much he had to end it, but since he was too afraid to kill himself he had imagined up a talking tree to tell him he could close his eyes and would wake up as its child, reborn.

The thought did not distract him from trying. What he had seen just now with his clothes had been evidence enough that something was different about this place. His every second here had felt absolutely magical. Who was to say he wasn’t about to experience some magic firsthand?

Taking the biggest gulp of air he could, Ashton slipped quickly under the surface of the near-freezing pond, as though doing it more quickly might make it less unpleasant. It didn’t. But as he opened his mouth, he found the water on his tongue didn’t feel cold, even if it made the rest of his body shake and convulse with freezing tremors. He drank in as much of the water as he could while he held his breath, imagining he was the taproot of some enormous tree and he was drinking life down from the earth into his soul. Each gulp came easier, and contrary to what basic physics would suggest, made him feel warmer and warmer. By the time he could force himself to swallow no more and he had to push off the bottom of the pond and surface again, he felt no cold at all on his skin. He was panting when he broke the surface of the water, gasping desperately for air, but he was also smiling.

The wind blew against his skin, but he did not feel the chill of it. It was just another part of the scenery around him, like the rocks and the fish and the buzzing insects. Nothing he needed to worry about. Yet the strange feeling hadn’t stopped there. Indeed, he felt as though his body were growing hotter and hotter by the moment. He felt it first at his ears, which abruptly began to stretch. It was as though the warmth of the water that had been cold had turned his ears to wax and was stretching them vertically away from him in both directions.

‘Am I becoming an Elf?’ he thought, as the feeling spread to his hair, which began growing slowly out and away from him, coming in as smooth and silky as glass.

Strangely, he heard the tree answer, much more clearly than before. It sounded so clear it was almost like real spoken conversation this time. His absurd thought was that his ears had been made bigger to hear it, but of course that didn’t make any sense. Besides, he hadn’t actually voiced his question. How was the tree responding before he even asked? “You are becoming one of the daughters of the forest,” it said. There was powerful emotion in its voice. Exultation. “It will be disorienting, but the pain will be over in an instant.”

“One of the d-“ he had started to say, before he felt a brief jolt all over his body. As he did, it seemed the pond grew abruptly deeper around him, from his waist to halfway up his chest. Another stab of pain made his eyes water, and he realized that it wasn’t the pond that was changing at all, it was him. The water, the magic, whatever it was, was seeking out every part of himself that didn’t fit and remaking it. His body seemed to be getting slimmer, thinner. He was already lean from a slim diet and an athletic lifestyle, but his arms and wrists and legs were getting thinner with each spasm. His skin too seemed somehow softer in the moonlight, his various scars and bruises and injuries simply not there when he looked for them. Nor were the patches of acne on his face, or the freckles on his arms where his skin got the most sun. It was all gone, all smoothed into skin as soft and delicate as lace.

The tree hadn’t just said “child” that time. It had said “daughter.” He realized what was happening then, but it was far too late. The burning in his chest brought growth there instead of shrinking, though it wasn’t muscles he was growing. There was no hiding the pair of pert breasts from his eyes in the light of the full moon, his wet skin gleaming silver. The pain got lower, as the bones in his middle began shifting and grinding subtly. Organs squelched a little as his insides rearranged, making space where before there hadn’t been any.

The last masculine pain Ashton would ever feel proved to be by far the worst, and he opened his mouth for one last strangled scream. The voice was very strange, escalating several octaves in the space of a few seconds before being strangled away completely from his throat. He kept right on screaming as the awful sensation of his outsides becoming insides filled his mind, stretching inward to fill a cavity that hadn’t been there before. But her screams were silent, aside from the faint flow of air over tiny white teeth and tongue. There no longer seemed to be anything there to produce sounds, even a bloodcurdling scream.

As the tree had promised, the pain did not last very long. When it had finally faded, Ashton collapsed into the water, lying naked on her back and closing her eyes. The water didn’t feel cold, but the pleasant coolness did serve to deaden the pain a little. It felt good to float here, almost like a sensory deprivation chamber. The pain had been so intense, the stress so fantastic, that she lacked the strength to stay awake anymore. Her hair spread out like a halo in the water around her as she closed her eyes to sleep. This couldn’t be real. It had all been a dream. When Ashton woke, everything would be back to normal.

Despite her late night, Ashton woke feeling quite alert as the sun peeked over the horizon. This was nothing new though. After all, the trees woke with the sun! Aston’s eyes opened and the sky was blue and gold above, aside from the green splotches of leaves here and there. ‘I wish I could wake up to this every day,’ she said to herself, or tried to say. Even though her lips and tongue moved to form the words though, the only sound was the faint rustle of a delicate exhalation.

The night’s events came rushing back into her memory and Ashton sat suddenly awake. It seemed she had drifted to the shore during the night, and slept in the shade of the gigantic tree. She was as naked as she had been then, and now in the light of the sun there was no concealing the reality of what had happened to her. A body delicate and thin, graceful, with no hair to speak of except for that billowing curtain that hung to her waist and rustled in the wind like the branches of a tree.

She looked up to the huge tree, reaching out to put one hand on its trunk. She could not speak, yet somehow that did not matter to the tree. It couldn’t speak either, after all. ‘Why didn’t you warn me?’ she asked, conveying with a stern expression the fierceness of her frustration and anger. ‘I wanted to stay, but it was wrong not to tell me I was going to become…’ She shrugged her shoulders, looking down briefly at her breasts. ‘This.’

It didn’t seem to take long at all for the tree to answer. Or maybe it was just that she was far more patient now. The sun was high in the sky before the tree had finished answering, and yet she hadn’t thought to be sitting still for all those hours was much bother. She had the sun on her skin to keep her company while she waited, and the breeze as it stirred her hair and made it dance along her back. That was enough conversation while she listened patiently to the tree make a single sentence. Strangely, it seemed the tree was more able to truly speak than she was. She could hear it, even if her own words came as mere thoughts that nothing but a tree could hear. “Because you might have said no, my daughter. This forest needs a guardian. I cannot go about the trees as you can. I cannot listen to the stories the yews and oaks tell far away, but you can. You can tend to the animals which move much too fast for me, and guard this place from intrusion. I might never have found another spirit like yours. Look beyond the physical and remember this is what you wanted.”

Of course, the great tree was right. She hadn’t wanted to be female, but everything else was exactly as advertized. No cold, no exhaustion from not sleeping long enough. No animal attacks in the night. Not even any little cuts or scrapes as she might have expected from lying here naked. Her skin must be stronger than it looked. ‘And why can’t I talk? Did you have to take my voice away?’

This time the rustling of the leaves seemed almost to be laughing at her. “My daughter, I didn’t take your voice. You merely traded the voice of men for the voice of the forest. Silent, yes. But the wood and fur will hear you all the same. Your gestures, your love, these do not require sound. This is a sacred place, and the sound of human speech does not belong here. You would have spoke so loudly that you drowned out the trees. Now you may only whisper, so faintly that every other voice will drown you out. You are the youngest, my daughter. You must learn by listening. And when the trees listen for you, they will hear.”

That was a frightening thought, that only the trees and animals would hear her, and only when they wanted to. It made her shiver suddenly frightened. It was one thing to dream wistfully about running away to the forest, but quite another to be completely beholden to it. She was at the mercy of plants if she wanted to talk to somebody! Of course it was too late to turn back now, she knew. She wasn’t going to change much at all, not even as years flew by like little flies. She might be seventeen for a thousand years. Just how long did elves live, anyway?

‘Yes, mother,’ she responded, rising to her feet. Despite the strange position she had slept in, Ashton did not feel weak. Her legs felt strong beneath her. Yet she felt no need to rush, or to run. She had plenty of time. ‘May I have clothes to wear?’ she asked the tree, cheeks bright red. It wasn’t as though she needed them. Her breasts were too small to hurt as she moved, and her body would not be harmed by anything in this garden. Still, little of her mind had changed. She didn’t like looking at her body, at the strange gentle curve of it beneath her. She also didn’t like the idea of being naked all the time, if only because she had worn clothing all her life.

“I will teach you to weave it,” said the tree, more affectionately than it had ever sounded. Ashton had just admitted to the relationship they shared. “The flowers of this bush are very soft, and in each is a tiny wisp of cotton.” As if on cue, one detached from the bush and floated down to land on one of her bare feet. Instead of bending down, Ashton lifted her leg close to her head. The gesture came as a sign of some pretty insane flexibility, since she was able to hold the foot flat enough that the tiny flower didn’t tumble away to either side.

Ashton slid her tiny fingers into the delicate flower, pinching off the little wisp of cotton that clung to the inside. Well it looked like cotton anyway, it was much softer and silkier. Like her skin. ‘It will take many flowers,’ she didn’t sound argumentative though, just a little frightened. ‘Hundreds.”

“Tens of thousands,” agreed the tree, far from reassuring. “It will take weeks perhaps, or months. You will be delicate and careful, not harming any of the flowers. As you gather it you will get to know every part of this garden, and meet with every tree. They will know you as you really are, so that when you cover yourself they will still recognize you.”

Yet for as insane as it sounded, this daunting task did not seem so difficult, really. The sheer enormity of the assignment, to gather the material for her own clothing and then weave it without tools, seemed beyond hopeless. But she wouldn’t argue. Besides, she was still a little angry after what had happened to her. Wandering through the rest of the garden would mean she would have some time alone. She did want to get to know the other trees here.

Many months passed. Summer turned to autumn and to winter and to spring, and the boy that had been Ashton was never found. A brief search was called after his second consecutive week of absence from school, but ultimately no sign of his presence could be found and he was declared a runaway.

Infinitely far from her old hometown, yet also not so far at all, Ashton still walked barefoot through the trees. With painstaking care and patience she had woven for herself a gown of sorts, white like the pale flowers she had taken it from, a single flowing sheet of fabric that wrapped around her chest and back, exposing her middle and legs and arms to the fantastic warmth of the sun. She seemed to glide between the trees of her forest, her hair rustling behind her like leaves and deep brown eyes moving slowly between the trees. She knew them all now, by name and shape and species, and they loved her in return. She did not have to open her mouth to sing with them the song of life, of roots buried deep and branches reaching always closer to the starlight.

She might not ever hear another human voice in her life, but she didn’t mind. Ashton did not even dream of humans anymore, nor did she even think about leaving her forest. At least, not until her mother asked her to. One day there would be another human like she had been, so much a friend to the trees that she had been able to hear their voice even without magic. Then, her mother promised, she might have a sister! Or if she was very lucky, a brother. It would depend on how well she listened and learned in the meantime.

It didn’t matter if she had to wait centuries. She was as patient as a tree.