The dryad is dreaming of different days.

Days under a different sun and wind-kissed skies.

Days when the world was young, unbound, and carefree, full of laughter. Filled with endless fields of wildflowers and of butterflies twirling in the breeze. She’s dreaming of trees swaying to the tune the old gods once breathed into the world.

The dryad is dreaming alone. Daughter of the forest, she is the last of her kind. A shy thing, twig-thin thing, a brittle thing. Not many remember her. She remembers many who are not of this world anymore.

She tends to run away, unseen, blending into the tree bark, hiding in plain sight, but secretly she longs to be seen. To laugh again. To dance again. Now dreaming is all that is left.

And so the dryad is dreaming of different days. Days that now fill the pages of storybooks. Trying to will long-lost magic back into being.

The dryad is dreaming of different days. Days hopping barefoot from one branch to the next, playing hide-and-seek with her sisters, giggling, weaving flowers into their hair. Playing contests with the hares, who’d outrun who. Sometimes they let the hares win. Days coaxing the ravens to share the secrets of flight, only the ravens stubbornly refusing to string two words together and they’d all laugh at it.

In her dreams, there is no space for longing. She dreams vivid dreams, the sun a caress, filtering through the crown of the trees, dreaming up fragments of a past still worth carrying in her heart.

She is dreaming of the child that enters the forest, wide-eyed and brave, the one that finally sees her. So they can dance, and laugh and make merry again. Like in those olden days, when merriment was all and the world didn’t need to make sense.

Little does she know it still doesn’t. And it never needed to.

….

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