The First Cathedral

I remember fire. Not the fleeting flame of lightning, but the crawling, ravenous blaze men first called into being when they split my children for kindling. It gnawed at my flesh, scrawled black scars that still run deep beneath moss and soil. But fire does not frighten me. Fire is only a messenger, one of many tongues of time. Hatred is too small, too fleeting, for what I am.

I am older than hatred. Older than man. Before their first word was uttered, before they painted the walls of caves with trembling hands, I stretched across the horizon. I bore witness when glaciers crushed mountains to powder. I drank from the floods that drowned valleys, and I rose again when the waters receded. The earth remembers me even when it forgets itself.

The animals still walk within me, unknowing, as they always have. Deer bow their delicate heads into my soil, their steps stitching stories only I can read. Wolves pursue them, hunger sharp as iron, and I bless their chase, for I have always sung in the balance of predator and prey. Rain comes, and I lift my face to it. Rain is my oldest hymn, older even than the roots of the mountains, older than the stars men claim to name.

And then men came. The first ones tread softly, fearful of the silence. They left prayers in smoke and blood. But reverence decayed. Their children arrived with axes, with saws that scream and teeth of steel. They no longer bowed. They cut and they burned and they called this dominion. They did not hear my warnings in the groan of branches before the storm, or the hush of leaves before frost. They believe they own me.

They believe wrongly.

I am older than their gods, and I will outlast their graves. I have seen their empires climb like ivy, only to wither into dust. Their monuments crumble at the whisper of my roots. Their iron rusts beneath my rains. Their towers, no matter how high, will fall and lie buried beneath my canopy. They build cities, but I build eternities.

Lovers carved their initials into a birch, letters swelling with bark until their names blurred into veins. Their vow became leaf-litter..

I am patient, but I am not merciful. When their engines fall silent and their empires choke on their own ash, I will walk among their ruins. Moss will weave its shroud over their temples. My roots will shatter their altars. My rivers will drag their bridges to the sea. Their proudest halls will echo only with owls and wind.

Even now, as they cut and tear, I feel the uprising of my legions. Seedlings, countless and unstoppable, press against the soil. Tiny fists of green, relentless as prophecy, rise to the light. Each one is an army folded tight into a fragile stem. They will grow into spears and crowns, into walls and skies. Against them, no blade will triumph, no fire will last.

This is my truth- I do not end. When I burn, I return. When I fall, I rise. When I am slain, I multiply. I fracture mountains, I drink the sun, I stretch across centuries. Time itself wears my crown.

I am the forest. I am the first cathedral, the final grave, the breath between worlds. I am the silence that consumes empires, the shadow that devours kings, the green tide that drowns their dominion. I am the beginning, and I am the end.

A coin fell between stones, forgotten. For a season it gleamed like a star to beetles, until rust softened it into the color of dusk.

A whistle dropped from a pocket, reeds choked with moss. Frogs nested in its hollow, and when wind passed through, the forest sang a new tune.

A book once slumped against a stump, its pages ruffled by storms until words became pulp. Mushrooms took the binding, and I read the story through their fruiting bodies.

A bell cracked loose from a church and rolled into the ferns. Owls perch on it now, their calls tolling truer than any clapper.

And when man is gone, I will remember him as briefly as a leaf remembers the wind.

A scarf snagged on a thorn, red dye bleeding into snow. By thaw, the cloth was gone, but the color lingered in the memory of foxes.

They think their stories will last because they write them in stone and fire, because they hammer their names into places that do not belong to them. Let them carve. The wind is a patient thief. Rain is a tireless larcenist. Moss is the slowest of thieves and the most thorough. I have time to read every nick and etching; I remember the hammer blows the way some remember a child’s first cry. Names fade to lichen; dates soften into rings beneath bark. Even their grief becomes compost.

Once, a child ran laughing through my saplings, light-footed and heedless, a quick flicker of breath and skin across my green ribs. A tin rattled from their pocket, clattering against stone, and tumbled into the ferns. It struck root and rock with the hollow ring of something lost. Inside, folded tight, was a scrap of paper. On it the child had drawn a sun with too many teeth, lines pressed hard by a hand that did not yet know restraint. Rain came, and the ink bled into the fibers, dark veins spreading like roots through the paper’s skin. Worms nosed at it, reading in their slow cursive, until the drawing softened into earth. Slugs polished what remained, smudging rays into a circle that resembled something older, more primitive, than the child’s intent. For a year I kept that sun, curious, tucked beneath a fern’s green hand. I learned that even their tenderness decays, that love, like ash, feeds me. And still, I remembered the child’s quick step, the tin’s startled music, the brief weight of their joy pressing against my floor. Memory can be mercy, and mercy is its own weather.

There is a place where once the shrieks of children leapt between iron swings. Time has braided those chains into birches, white-barked pillars that have turned the swings into hammocks for foxes. At dusk, the animals curl there, russet tails tucked beneath muzzles, and the frames creak with the memory of laughter. Sometimes, when wind stirs just right, the old bolts rattle faintly, echoing the rhythm of play. I remember the heat of hands on the metal, the arcs of bodies swooping, shoes scuffing soil into clouds. The children carried their joy like torches, brief and bright, before dropping it into the years where it smoldered and sank. Now foxes inherit the rhythm, swaying in silence, each nap a requiem and a renewal. I walk among them as a scholar through an archive, translating giggle into yawn, shriek into paw-dream. Nothing is lost; everything is rewritten.

Sometimes one returns. A figure thin as winter, shoulders bowed by grief, eyes hollow from forgetting. They come stumbling through undergrowth until a trunk arrests them, and there they lean, palm pressed flat against bark as though listening for a heartbeat. Their tears slip soundless into the moss, salt mingling with soil, a confession too soft for language. I feel the shiver of their frame, the way breath breaks inside their chest, and I know this is not dominion but petition. I do not punish such hands. I cradle their sorrow as rain cradles ash. Yet memory has roots deeper than pity; the echo of axes still mutters beneath the rings. One season of tears cannot ransom centuries of taking. I let them go with dirt beneath their nails and sap on their sleeve, marked in a way they will not name but will carry, like a scar that sings in weather.

Once, long ago, a girl carried a candle into the ribs of an old oak I had split with lightning. She left it there, trembling in its cup of wax, flame licking shadows into the hollow. For a night the tree glowed with borrowed fire, the way a heart glows when it holds a secret. Moths battered themselves against the light, wings powdered with frenzy, while she whispered a name she dared not speak in daylight. By morning, the candle had guttered, wax pooled like milk on the bark, and the name she left had already begun to sink into my grain. I kept it, the syllables warped by moss until they belonged to no one. Love burns quickly, but wood remembers the scorch.

In the season of war, a man fell across my roots and never rose. His coat tore as the body softened, and from the cloth rolled a single button — brass, dented, stamped with a crest already half-forgotten by his own king. Rain polished it, ants marched across it, and for decades it lay in the duff like a small, stubborn planet. Children found it once, years later, and pocketed it as treasure, spinning stories of knights and dragons. The button traveled through their games until it slipped away again, swallowed by moss. I still feel its circle beneath the soil, cold as old authority, bright as play. Even empires collapse into trinkets; even trinkets bloom into myth.

A shoe once wedged in my roots, laces knotted by mud. The child outgrew it, but I still cradle the leather, cracked and sweet with rain.

Fungi are my conspirators. Mycorrhizal threads are the letters of a language older than any human tongue; through them I gossip with maples and birches, with the weed that hates the path and the lichen that loves stone. We trade news of beetle outbreaks and of rains. We carry stories — not of kings, but of the taste of a river last summer, of which slope kept its snow the longest, of the night when the moon fell oddly and owls could not find their bearings. These stories are not sentimental. They are exact. They are sustenance.

There will be descendants of man that speak different languages, or perhaps none at all. Perhaps in some far season a new cleverness will creak into being and lay its hand upon the earth in a way I can respect. If they learn to listen before taking, if they learn that dominion is a debt and a duty, then I may teach them the architecture of seasons- how to grow a shelter that is also a promise, how to burn in a way that feeds rather than fevers, how to take only the fruit that ripens for the asking. I am not wholly cruel; I am entirely honest. What I offer is simple- become part of the ledger that remembers you kindly, or become a footnote folded back into the earth.

Listen now, beneath the hum of beetles and the stop-and-start applause of rain. There is a sapling pushing through the mosaic of a once-trusted plaza. Its first leaves uncurl like flags. Between the cracks, a tiny green hand claims a name no human ever thought to use — the name of persistence. It smells faintly of iron and glue and the lullaby that once lived in a tin. I teach it to root. I teach it to sing.

When it stands, years from this hour, let some future traveler ask aloud who planted that stubborn tree. I will answer, awash in the slow laughter of leaves- I planted it, and it remembered them for as long as memory deserves.