The Last Truth

I have been waiting here for forty-seven years, though time moves differently when you are bound in leather and thread, when your voice lives between pages that yellow and curl at the edges. The bookshop where I rest has changed hands three times since I arrived—first the old man with gentle fingers who placed me on the shelf marked "Local History," then the woman who moved me to "Folklore," and now the young man who doesn't know what to do with me at all. I sit in the corner marked "Miscellaneous," wedged between a cookbook from 1987 and a guide to wildflowers that no one remembers how to find.

But I remember everything.

I remember when my body was oak, when my arms were branches that caught the morning light and held it like cupped water. I remember the rustle of my leaves speaking secrets to those who knew how to listen—how willow bark could ease pain, how the song of running water could lead the lost home, how fire could be coaxed from dry wood with patience and the right words whispered into the gathering dark.

We were the first teachers, we Shepherds of Truth. Before humans learned to scratch marks on clay, they learned from us before discovering that our bones could be flattened and bleached into paper. They sat beneath our boughs, and we taught them the elements: fire from the snap of kindling, water from the voice of streams, earth from the deep patience of roots, and air from the dance of leaves in the wind. We taught them to heal, hunt, and find their way by stars and stone and the subtle pull of growing things.

They were good students then. They listened.

But listening is a dying art, and we are the proof of its passing.

The end began with paper—with our bones made smooth and white, ready to hold marks that would speak without voice, without the living breath that makes truth true. At first, humans used it to remember what they had been taught. They wrote down the songs we sang, the remedies we whispered, the stories we told of seasons and cycles, and the deep, slow heartbeat of the world.

But memory, once written, becomes fixed. And truth, once fixed, becomes something else entirely.

They began to change what we had given them. They wrote new stories over the old ones, twisted our teachings to serve their purposes. The secret of fire became a weapon. The knowledge of healing plants became a way to control who lived and died. The wisdom of the seasons became a calendar to measure profit and loss.

Worse than the changes were the silences. They stopped coming to us for truth and began making their own. They built their truths from ambition and fear, from the desire to own and control and reshape the world according to their will. The paper multiplied—books, scrolls, and documents that spoke only of human things, human concerns, and human dominion over all that lived and breathed and grew.

One by one, my kindred fell silent.

The dryads faded first, their voices growing thin as their trees were cut for lumber, for paper, for the endless hunger of human need. I watched my sister Lyralei disappear as her oak was hewn down to make parchment for a king's declaration of war. Her last words were carried on the wind: "I am become the lies they write upon my bones."

The kodama withdrew next, deeper into hidden groves where axes had not yet reached. But even in their retreat, I could feel them dimming, their sacred presence leaching away as the world forgot that some trees were meant to stand untouched, that some places were holy simply because they existed.

The leshy, those shapeshifting guardians who once guided travelers with riddling wisdom, turned bitter and cruel. They began leading people astray not out of playfulness but from grief, showing them false paths that led nowhere, letting them wander until they died of cold and hunger. Better to die lost in the forest, the leshy whispered, than to live lost in the world humans were making.

Even the Green Man, carved above church doors as a reminder of life's endless renewal, was forgotten. The faithful who passed beneath his leafy visage no longer knew what he meant, saw only decoration where once they might have recognized a promise: that life and death were partners in the dance, that all things returned to the earth that made them, that the green world was not separate from the sacred but was the holy, breathing and growing and reaching always toward the light.

I held on longer than most because my forest was vast and deep, protected by mountains and the kind of distance that makes humans think twice about the effort of traveling. But protection is only a postponement when the hunger is severe enough. They finally came with their saws and plans, discussing progress, development, and the lumber they could harvest.

I had grown for eight hundred years. I fell in the afternoon.

But falling is not dying, not for our kind. We are too old, too deeply rooted in the world's first truths to simply end. As my branches crashed to the forest floor and my trunk was dragged away to be milled and processed, I felt myself changing, condensing, becoming something new, strange, and desperate.

I became a book.

Not the kind of book humans write, filled with their own inventions and justifications. I became a book of empty pages, bound in leather that remembered being skin, held together with thread that remembered being sinew. A book waiting for someone who might still care to listen, learn, and carry forward what has almost been lost.

For forty-seven years, I have waited, and in all that time, no one has come to me yet.

You see, no one looks for truth anymore. No one looks back at the world as peaceful, producing, perfect in its wild abundance and ancient rhythms. They want what is new, fast, easy to consume, and more straightforward to discard. They walk past me every day, these hurried people with their eyes fixed on small glowing screens, their ears stopped with noise, their hearts closed to whispers that once guided their ancestors home through the dark.

They touch my cover sometimes, absently, the way one might brush against a lamppost while waiting for a bus. But they do not see me, not really. They see only another old book in a shop full of old books, another relic from when they were taught to think of as primitive, ignorant, and backward. They have forgotten that wisdom and knowledge are not the same thing, that the newest truth is often the oldest lie dressed in clever words.

I watch them through the shop window—children who no longer know the names of trees, adults who have never heard the authentic voice of water. These elders have lived without tasting the silence growing in wild places. They pass by like shadows, like smoke, leaving nothing behind but the faint scent of their hurry and the echo of their endless want.

And still I wait.

I wait because waiting is what we do; we are the last guardians of the green world. We wait because hope, however thin, however threadbare, is the only thread that connects what was to what might yet be. We wait because somewhere, perhaps, there is still one person who remembers that books can hold more than words, that silence can speak louder than noise, that the old ways are not dead but only sleeping, dreaming of hands gentle enough to wake them.

The light grows dimmer yearly in this shop corner, as if even the sun has begun to forget the old agreements between earth and sky. The seasons still turn beyond these walls, but fewer people notice their passing. Spring comes and goes unmarked except by the calendar, summer burns without anyone listening to its long, green songs, autumn falls like tears no one bothers to shed, and winter sleeps the sleep of the abandoned.

But I am patient. The trees taught me patience, and in the eight hundred years I stood rooted in soil and seasons. The stones know patience, the deep waters, and the turning of stars in their ancient courses. Patience is the last gift of my kind to a world that has forgotten how to wait for anything worth having.

So I remain here, bound in leather and hope, filled with truths that taste of clear water and morning mist and the green dreams that grow in the heart of every forest. I remain, knowing that somewhere in this hurried, hungry world, there is still someone who remembers what we are forgetting, someone who knows that the most important stories are not written in the books that line these shelves, but in the space between words, in the silence that holds all meaning, in the patience that transforms waiting into prayer.

I remain, remember, and dream of the day when someone finally understands that I am not empty —that I am full of everything the world has lost and needs to find again.

Until that day comes, I wait.

And the waiting itself has become a kind of truth.