Side Story 5.9: Da'Keeba Guardian of the Forest
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Farrowlands
Beyond the major great forests of Arkanus, another such forest existed elsewhere.
It sat at the east of the subcontinent, not as grand or immediately imposing in its proportions as the forests of the western and central regions, but ancient in a way that the eastern peoples understood with the specific reverence that long familiarity with something terrible produces. In the northern reaches of the Eastern Continents Northern Farowlands, where the land pressed up against the great northern seas and the cold came down from latitudes that did not particularly consider human habitation in their planning, there stretched a forest of origins so old that the records which described them had themselves become historical artifacts. It was called the Great Boreal Bear Forest, and it ran from west to east across the northern belt of the eastern subcontinent in an unbroken wall of ancient growth, acting simultaneously as barrier to the sea's worst moods and haven to beasts whose lineages predated every kingdom, dynasty, and empire that had ever used the same land to build its ambitions on.
It was untouched. It had been that way for ten thousand years.
The reason for this was not geography or climate or the absence of people who might otherwise have wanted its primeval timber. The eastern Arkanians were not shy about clearing forests when those forests were in their way of progress. The reason was simpler and considerably harder to dismiss: there was something in the Great Boreal Bear Forest that had been there for ten thousand years and intended to remain there indefinitely, and the people who had learned this fact, generation after generation, had passed the knowledge forward with the specific emphasis appropriate to information that kept you alive.
His name was Da'Keeba. The people of the northern Farowlands had called him the Guardian of the Forest for so long that it had become his name more completely than whatever he had been called before.
He was not a god. This was a distinction that mattered to the scholars who wrote about him in academic histories and to Da'Keeba himself, who had spent ten thousand years being clear on the point with anyone who raised it. He was not a god, nor was he divine, he was also not blessed in the sense that gods blessed things. He was simply a man who could not die, which was a different kind of problem entirely, and whose continued existence had been shaped by a consequence whose original cause he had long since mostly forgotten, or possibly fabricated, or possibly chose not to remember because the memory did not serve his continued functioning. Ten thousand years was a long time to maintain a precise relationship with any specific piece of information.
Every few hundred years, when the accumulated weight of that much remembered time began to produce symptoms in his cognition that he had learned to recognize, he went into a hibernated rest for approximately a year, and when he woke he had released what he no longer needed to carry forward. It was not quite forgetting. It was more like the deliberate and controlled reduction of a library that had grown too large for its building. He kept what mattered. He let go of what had stopped mattering to his continued existence and after that he continued to live.
The Great Boreal Bear Forest continued with him, untouched and uncut and alive in the specific ways that ancient growth is alive when nothing has been allowed to interrupt it for ten millennia.
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The Actual Truth of the Matter
Ten thousand years ago, before the split that separated the once-whole continent of Arkanus into the three subcontinents it was now, there was a warrior named Da'Keeba who was not yet a guardian of anything.
He was tall, which was already an understatement at eight feet in the period of his youth, and he was built in proportion to that height, which meant that the war band he rode with had a mounted member who functioned effectively as walking siege equipment. He rode a horse named Hoover, which was a dark-maned warhorse of darkish gray coloration and a size that matched its rider because a standard horse would not have functioned under him. Hoover was a six-legged beast, a species not documented anywhere outside the northern Farowlands, and was approximately a foot taller than Da'Keeba himself. The two of them together, at full gallop and in the approach to an enemy position, were the kind of sight that tended to resolve tactical situations before contact.
His primary weapon was what he called, with the cheerful literalism of a man who did not see the point of poetic naming conventions, the Big Knife. The Grosse Messer was his preferred term when he was feeling formal about it, which was not often. The blade was scaled to his proportions, which meant it was the size of a reasonably large sword for anyone standing at a normal human height, and he carried it strapped across his back alongside a warbow that could launch arrows with sufficient force to penetrate walls that would have stopped conventional archery entirely. In raids, which were the primary organized military activity of his culture and era, he rode at the front and provided the specific service of making whatever fortification was in front of the party into a less significant obstacle.
He retired from this when his body had accumulated enough of the damage that years of riding and fighting produce, and he became a carpenter.
This was not a diminishment. Da'Keeba approached carpentry with the same focused commitment he had applied to mounted raiding, and the results were proportional to that commitment. He could construct things, full stop, from complex structural frameworks to furniture to objects that the people commissioning them had not been entirely certain were possible until he produced them. He became a well known craftsman. He became sought after. And he built things for people who had the resources to hire the best available, and he was that person the best available carpenter in the entire region, and for a considerable period of time his life was organized around the uncomplicated satisfaction of making things out of wood.
Then a certain king hired him.
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The Order
The king wanted a throne. Not an ordinary throne made from ordinary wood in ordinary ways by ordinary craftsmen, which was what ordinary kings commissioned. He wanted something worthy of his understanding of his own significance, which was large, it was a Gilded Throne that his entire line of succession would seat upon as long as they ruled, and he had decided that the material appropriate to this significance was timber from the Great Boreal Bear Forest.
Everyone Da'Keeba consulted on this matter, when the commission was relayed to him, told him the same thing: no. Not under any circumstances. Not for any money. The Great Boreal Bear Forest was not a place where you went to cut trees. This was not a suggestion. It was the accumulated wisdom of several generations of people who had watched what happened to those who ignored its warning, expressed in the firmest available terms.
Da'Keeba brought this assessment to the king.
But the sly king had already brought Da'Keeba's wife and children into the room and explained the alternative, their lives or…
So Da'Keeba went to the Great Boreal Bear Forest with his axe.
He was not thinking about what he was doing. This was not a metaphor. The specific situation he found himself in — the coercion, the fear, the anger, the guilt, the desperate reduction of everything in his mind to the single task that would make the threat go away — had produced a state that was not quite the normal thinking in the way that deliberate action requires thinking. He was operating on something closer to the automatic machinery that bodies develop through decades of practice, the unconscious physical competence that runs underneath conscious attention. When he finally found the tree that he thought would be most appropriate to be used in the building of the gilded throne, he began to cut it.
But the tree was not an ordinary tree.
Da'Keeba did not know this because he was not in a condition to receive that kind of information. He was running on the grinding repetition of axe against wood, stroke after stroke, day after day, night after night, for a month, in the particular locked-down state of someone who has reduced their universe to the immediate task because expanding it to include everything else produces unbearable conditions.
The tree whispered to him. But he did not hear it. His mind was not available for any of the noise that came to it.
What the tree was, and what Da'Keeba was destroying with each stroke over twenty-eight continuous days, was one of the World Trees: an anchor point of the forest's natural order, a living structural element around which the ecosystem of the Great Boreal Bear Forest had organized itself for longer than any human civilization had existed to observe it. Each great forest had such anchors. The removal of one did not damage the forest the way removing an ordinary tree damaged it. It unmade the forest's relationship with itself, and what filled that void was not immediately describable in terms that human language had been designed to accommodate.
At the end of the month, the great tree fell. The sound of its falling was heard at great distances that sound is not normally heard. The ground responded in ways that the ground does not normally respond to a normal falling of a tree. And Da'Keeba was deeply engrossed with his work and continued without ceasing, because his work was to produce a throne, and he had not yet managed to produce said throne.
He carved. He shaped. He gilded. And he did what he had come to do. He silenced the word outside his own mind.
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The Gilded Throne
When he dragged the completed throne back toward the kingdom, he noticed that the world had changed while he had been unavailable to it.
This was not a subtle observation. The places he walked through on the return journey were not the places he had walked through on the way out. Some of them had burned. Others had been overgrown with decades of plant life in the time it should have taken him to walk from one settlement to another. The settlements themselves were either gone or so thoroughly transformed that his memory of them did not match his eyes.
When he finally reached the throne room.
The king was there. He was dying, which was not yet the part that mattered to Da'Keeba. Roots had grown into his wounds — not through them in the way that roots eventually grow through anything that remains in the ground long enough, but into them, in the specific way that something with intent grows into something else. New life was growing from every point of entry or exit that a body had and these small things were moving in the spaces between.
On the floor of the throne room, in a space that had once been a place of polished stone and human craft was now replaced with a forest grove, and it is also where Da'Keeba found his wife and his children. Flowers grew from them with the thoroughness of something that had claimed them entirely. From their eyes, their mouths, every pore, every opening. They had become part of the reclamation.
Da'Keeba's understanding of what had happened arrived in pieces, because the human mind receives that kind of information in pieces rather than all at once. He cried. He asked why. He received no answer from the room, which had nothing left in it that was capable of answering him.
Then a voice.
It was female in its timbre and it also was not. It was a sound produced by wood in the specific way that something that has always been wood and not flesh would sound when it speaks in the form of words that were not its natural mode of communication. It came from beside the gilded throne, where a being had appeared that was not like anything Da'Keeba had a category for.
She was tall, and growing taller as she settled into a form. Her skin was bark. Her hair was leaves, or what served as leaves. Her hands and feet were root structures, mobile and precise. Flowers bloomed from her, not decoratively but continuously, as though her existence could not help but produce them. She touched the gilded throne — Da'Keeba's work, the thing he had made from her child — with the specific quality of attention that someone brings to something that is simultaneously beautiful and unbearable.
She was the Queen Of Trees. She had taken a shape that Da'Keeba could address because what she needed from him required a form of communication that the forest wouldn't be able to communicate to humans.
"How does it feel, human," she said, and her voice was hollow stone and moving water and something else underneath both, "to see one's loved ones die without being able to do anything about it."
Da'Keeba did not understand what she was saying because he did not yet understand what he had done. He had not known what the tree was that he felled. He had not understood what its death would produce. He had been so entirely absent from himself during the month of cutting that the knowledge of his own actions had not been available to him as they occurred.
"What do you mean?" he said.
Her hollow eyes found him. The rage that came with that attention was not a human scale of emotion. It pressed him physically, the aura of it reducing the space in which he stood to something that his body registered as incompatible with easy breathing. Around her, the floor of the throne room instantly became that of the forest floor in the time it would normally take someone to draw a breath.
"Do you not truly know what you have done?"
She crossed the space between them and took hold of him by his neck, growing as she moved until she held the eight-foot carpenter off the floor as though the weight was not a consideration worth addressing. She grew and grew, until she was the scale of something that should not be able to exist in an enclosed space, and she was about to end his life in the specific way that something feels when it has concluded that ending is the appropriate response.
In the moment before she did, she saw.
The contact of her hand on him gave her access to what his mind had been during the month in the forest: the locked-down, guilt-driven, fear-driven absence from himself, the sound of the young world tree whispering as it died, who tried to reach him but was not able to reach the part of him that was consciously available to receive anything outside. She saw the king's threat. She saw the wife and children whose lives had been the leverage. She saw that the crime had been committed in a condition that was not a fully conscious choice, by a man who had not known what he was destroying because the knowledge had not been available to him in the state he was in.
Her grip loosened slightly.
Da'Keeba, his voice compressed by her hold into something barely functional, produced a word.
"I am sorry."
It came out wrong. It was barely audible. But she received it.
Her grip loosened further. She lowered him. She stood in the throne room that had become a grove and she held the gilded throne — her child's body, transformed into this extraordinary thing by the hands of the man in front of her — and she understood that what had happened was a sequence of events that human and non-human decisions had produced together, each compounding the last, until the point of irreversibility came.
She could not return what had been lost. She could not unchoose what had already been chosen. What she could do was respond to it, and the response she chose was not the destruction she had nearly committed.
She cursed him instead.
Da'Keeba would remain in the Great Boreal Bear Forest for eternity, he would not be able to leave it, he would not die and he would guard the place that his actions had done irreversible damage, in substitution for the world tree whose place he had destroyed, for as long as the forest required his guarding. It was a punishment appropriate to the crime because the crime had been one of absence, of not being present to what he was doing, and the punishment was an eternal and inescapable presence.
He accepted this. He had nothing left to refuse it with.
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Dakee'Ba's Transformation
The curse did not leave him entirely as he had been. Ten thousand years of existence as the forest's guardian produced physical changes that were, at this point, comprehensive enough that the word human was no longer truly applied to his current form categorically.
He stood ten feet tall now, which was already how tall he had been in the past, but the composition of that height had shifted. He was more tree than he was man, in the sense that bark had replaced skin across much of his body and root structures had replaced other elements in ways that were functional rather than decorative. His face was still his face. His arms, mostly. His hands. The Grosse Messer was still strapped across his back, the Big Knife that had been too large for normal humans ten thousand years ago and was now carried by something that made ordinary humans look like children in comparison, he was something who had wandered into a space built for beings like himself. The warbow was also still with him.
The queen's curse had come with what the curse required to be fulfilled: the capabilities necessary for him to do what the curse demanded of him.
His wounds healed faster than they could accumulate. A cut that would have taken a person weeks to recover from would have closed under the blink of an eye. His wood element was not the kind of element that beings such as Isabel Peerce had developed through training and natural affinity, though it shared a lineage with it. His was a direct blessing from the Queen Of Trees, which was a different thing entirely in the same way that a river is a different thing from the rain that eventually becomes one. He did not manipulate plant life so much as conduct it, in the way that a conductor does not produce sound but organizes what is already present into forms it could not reach independently. Roots rose from the earth at his consideration. Entlings formed from the tree matter of the forest, walking constructs of wood and bark that fought with the focused purpose of things that had been given direction by something that understood the forest completely. Every movement within the forest floor was visible to him. He could communicate to trees and through them, covering the full length of the Great Boreal Bear Forest in the time it would take someone else to turn their head, it was an instant teleportation.
And he could move through the forest in the specific way that things which are of the forest can move through it: appearing from the ground upward, growing into presence rather than walking to it, arriving at the far end of the forest in the time it took for a tree to appear at the surface.
Those who had come to the Great Boreal Bear Forest to cut its trees, across ten thousand years of attempts by various kingdoms, empires, and ambitious individuals, had left evidence of the encounter in the form of the specific marks Da'Keeba left at the site of every intervention: a crafted wooden stake in the shape of a cross, placed with the care of a carpenter who had not stopped being a carpenter simply because his career had taken a particular turn. The bodies around the marker, or what remained of them where roots do when they were directed with precision, were typically enough to carry the message to those who wish to follow without additional annotation.
The message had been received, generally, by those who came after.
Da'Keeba remained in his forest and he would remain in it for a very long time. This was the arrangement the Queen of Trees cursed him, and he had accepted the arrangement ten thousand years ago and had not found a reason to revisit any other thoughts, his life before was long gone and he would rather pay the price of his sins.
In the far distance, in the part of the horizon that even Da'Keeba's long sight could not resolve into specifics, something was moving. Something that had been moving for a very long time and was still gaining definition. The Great Boreal Bear Forest had felt it before Da'Keeba had been able to understand what it was. The trees would feel everything eventually. And what the trees were feeling was the leading edge of something that would require more than any single forest to hold.
Da'Keeba did not know yet what it was. But he knew it was coming.
He had all the time in the world to prepare for its eventuality. Ten thousand years had taught him the value of patience in the face of things that were not yet visible enough to act on.
He would continue his duties, to be the forest's everlasting guardian.