As she searched through the dense fog of darkness that surrounded her, Faylinn strode onward, trudging through the maple leaves that littered the ground.  As the leaves danced in the slight midnight breeze, they whispered, as if gossiping about something she had done.  She walked closer and closer, pulling her sweater more firmly around her and tightening her grip on the knife she held in her sweaty hand.  Lifting the lantern out a little further, her heart skipped a beat.  There it was, finally.

The hole. 

The hole from the dreams that had plagued her ever since Deron had disappeared two weeks ago.  Faylinn knelt down, keeping her eyes on the hole, and waited.  Her pink Converse dug into her leg and she shifted her foot.  She froze.  What was that?  A twig snapped behind her and Faylinn whirled around. 

There he was.  Deron.  But there was something wrong.  He was everywhere.  He surrounded her, holding his arms out. 

"Come to me," the forest whispered.  "We have been waiting for you."  The trees leaned towards her menacingly, their bare branches weaving in the breeze.  The leaves' whispering turned into shouts, bouncing off the inside of her brain.  The ferns brushed their long, leafy arms against her bare legs and she screamed.  

It was a long drawn-out scream of despair, fear, anxiety and loss.  Faylinn screamed with all the pain and misery of the past fortnight.  She screamed for Deron.  When she could scream no more, she started sobbing.  The whole forest was silent, only the sound of the sobs racking her chest broke the pre-dawn silence.    The forest seemed to tell her to look down into the hole.  She did.  There he was.  Deron.  He was dead, his face pale and moss growing on his cheeks.

A single tear dripped from her face.  The silvery, salty drop of pure sorrow fell down, down, down, down. It reached the bottom of the hole and splashed onto Deron's face.  His skin started to turn brown.  His arms elongated and grew.  Up, Up, Up.  He sprouted into a sprout, grew into a sapling, and finally, creaked into a giant tree right before her eyes.

The forest was completely silent now.  Faylinn's knife and lantern lay forgotten on the ground.  Slowly, the tree creaked and groaned, stretching, and two circular holes on the tree's trunk blinked.  Blinked?  They were eyes.  Deep old eyes that glistened with unshed tears, glinting with the sorrow of which the tear it was borne.  The eyes seemed to have a personality all to their own, full of sorrow, old and new, love, and, most of all, wisdom and peace.  A slit beneath the tree's eyes rasped and yawned.  A wide mouth opened and groaned.

At first, Faylinn didn't register that the tree had made that sound.  She looked around, confused, until her eyes alighted upon the tree.  Her face dawned with comprehension. The tree's mouth - if you could call it that - rasped into something resembling a smile.

"Am I crazy?" Faylinn muttered to herself, "Or did I just see a tree grow up right in front of my eyes, open its mouth and groan?"

"I am not what you would call a tree.  I am Eiran.  I was Deron."

Faylinn peered at the tree - or not - from all angles, her eyes glinting with suspicion.  She stood up and strode all the way around the tree-like entity, as if determining that it was not a hallucination.

"I told you my new name," the tree rumbled, "It would be polite to return the favor."  Once again, its mouth scraped into that half-smile.

"My name is Faylinn, but if you are Deron, you should know my nickname," the girl, Faylinn, answered, her voice thick with bitterness.  "But he really is gone now.  My dad is right.  He is dead.  Gone.  Forever.  I saw him.  He's dead."

"Did you not hea-a-a," at this point, the gargantuan tree yawned, stretching.  Eiran's branches creaked and groaned and showered Faylinn with leaves and acorns.  "Sorry about that.  I meant to say, Faye, did you not hear me the first time?  I said I am Deron."

Faylinn's eyes glistened with hope for a moment, then she considered her source.  "You're a tree that just showed up out of nowhere and told me exactly what I wanted to hear."  She nodded definitively.  "I am insane."

Eiran considered her words.  "I was brought back with the magic of your tears,"  he rumbled.  "I know all.  Love and Hate.  Life and Death.  Sorrow and Joy.  I am Eiran.  I am Peace."

"Nice speech, tree man."  Faye gazed at the ginormous tree appraisingly.  Faylinn thought back to earlier that afternoon, or by now it would be yesterday, and how her dad had treated her.  He drove her for what seemed like hours, to a professional psychiatrist in the nearest town, Azurel.  It was about 25 miles away, on a winding dirt road scattered with the occasional roadkill.  He kept glancing at her in the passenger's seat, as if she had contracted something contagious. 

The psychiatrist treated her like she wasn't there.  He muttered to her father it might be a desperate bid for attention.  She lost her temper. 

"Then where the heck is Deron?!? Is he locked up in a room around here?"  Faylinn snorted derisively.  "Was he 'desperate for attention?'  Did he 'lose his mind?'" She stormed out of the room, leaving her father, with a bemused look on his face, and the physiatrist, busy scribbling notes, behind her.

The creaking and shifting of Eiran's branches brought her back to reality, and she blinked up at the massive, weathered face.  "Are you feeling well?" His massive face showed a depth of emotion she had never seen on any living creature before.  Compassion and empathy.  Love and sympathy.  And a joy that somehow felt like it had been matured in an oaken cask for a number of years.

She told him.

        She told him of the nightmares she had suffered the past two weeks, revealing to her that Deron had not simply gone traveling.

         She told him of her father, who believed her insane.

         She told him of the nights spent alone, sobbing silently in bed as to not wake her parents.

One of his branches curled around her waist and gently carried her up to the center of the tangle of leaves and branches that obscured the top of the trunk.  Inside was a neat little hollow, with a roof of woven branches and a floor of the bases of all the boughs coming out from the enormous trunk.

The floor was carpeted with soft, fresh leaves, and as soon as the limb softly deposited her in the center of the nest-like hollow, she fell fast asleep.  The branches closed in above her and Faylinn closed her eyes.

She looked a lot more peaceful when she was sleeping, the tree thought as he absentmindedly brushed a strand of her soft auburn hair back with a branch.  She looked almost happy.

When Faye awoke it took her a little while to absorb her surroundings.  She glanced around and remembered.  She almost dissolved into tears again.  Deron wasn't Deron anymore.  He was a tree thing.

The tree rumbled at her.  "Sleep well, Faylinn?"

She blinked her eyes, clearing the sleep from them.  She gazed the ceiling for a time, ignoring Eiran.
   
      Then a brand reached down from the ceiling, and Faylinn could feel the leaves at the end of the arm brush some of the hair on Faye's forehead back.  She awoke fully and looked around.  She saw Deron standing over her, and started.

"Deron!  I thought you were a tree?"

"I am, but while inside this little place I am able to manifest into a physical form."  His dark hair fell into his green eyes and he brushed it back carelessly.

"What happened in the forest?"

"There is something dark living in that forest.  I sacrificed myself to drive it back to that hole.  You have great magic Faye, only a true friend could have pulled me back from death, even in this half-form.  You must learn to control it.  You could do great damage to the other side."

Faye stumbled back against the woven branches and took a deep breath.  She remembered Deron, but not Deron, surrounding her, embodied by an evil force.  The dark being had manipulated her.

     Faylinn hated it when people manipulated her.

      She breathed, and told Deron.

"I'm going back."  She breathed deeply.  "Into the forest, I mean.  Screw my dad, he doesn't need me."

"I'm coming too.  This tree can walk, you know."  He held out his hand, and Faye took one look at it and grinned.

"First let me grab a flashlight."