The Forest Spirit

The Waldgeist is at her liveliest during spring, and it is beautiful to behold.

As the snows melt, the little shoots and saplings begin to grow with her whispers to encourage them. Her eyes glow every time she watches a shoot peek through the ground, a leaf uncurl, a bud blossom. Her smile is as bright as the sun, and when it reflects off the cold morning dew, she dazzles him.

When he has a free moment, he watches her work, silent and attentive. She is happy for the company and teaches him all about the plants, how to sing even the most stubborn flower into blooming. He tries to memorise everything, not just her teachings, but also the trill of her songbird voice, and the light of her jade eyes. The shimmer of her golden hair in the spring sun haunts him as much as the brush of her hand against his does.

It is during spring that the Waldgeist sometimes disappears. She spends days on end with older trees deep in the forest to help them accept spring and grow green again for at least one more year.

He would follow, but she goes to the sacred places he is barred from. He sometimes forgets she is a spirit and that he is just a man.

Sometimes she helps with birthing animals too, but he knows she mostly leaves them to themselves. She tells him the animals—particularly the deer—are too proud to ask for her help.

During summer, she is more carefree, at her happiest. Fields of flowers bloom for her songs (ones he could never hope to reproduce on his little pipe, no matter how many times she assures him of his talent), and fruits ripen at her touch. She invites him to eat with her in the shade of a large oak tree most days, and, to his shame, he fixates on the way fruit juices dribble down her chin.

They swim together in pools at the bottom of a singing waterfall, and she sings with it. He blushes for her nakedness, but she is unabashed. She is nature incarnate, and what is more natural than nakedness? The waters cool him off until her intense, watchful gaze heats his blood again. He ducks beneath the water to hide his blush, closing his eyes so he does not peek. She laughs at him when he surfaces and he convinces himself that the pink he spies on her cheeks afterwards is from the sun.

Any alternative makes him tremble far more than it should.

Summer rain is warm, and he dances with the Waldgeist between the tall, swaying trees, doing his best not to trip on roots when her graceful movements distract him. He still falls eventually, but this is because she pulls him to her and their feet tangle. His breath is knocked from him when she lands on top of him, but he does not mind. Her soft smile and darkened eyes take any of his remaining breath away.

He swallows thickly when she continues to stare at him, and his heart thunders as she brushes his soaked hair off his forehead.

Without his permission, his mouth tells her, “You are the most beautiful creature in this forest.”

She laughs. Her lips are soft and she breathes shakily. Her skin is sweet and she breaths him in. It is a joy he has no right to know, but he will take anything she will give him.

He wonders if it is safe to love the Waldgeist like he does, for nature itself is not safe. He does not care, her kisses are too good to stop.

In autumn, the Waldgeist slows, murmuring songs of sleep to her forest as the days shorten and the nights grow colder. Leaves fall from the trees so that the ground crackles like firewood under her feet when she dances. Even storms do not seem to stop her, though they force him to watch from a distance, longing to join her, even if it means daring Death.

He brings her new gloves and boots when the harvests finish. They fit perfectly, as he knew they would, and the kiss she gives him in thanks makes his knees weak. That night they roast nuts over a fire and he holds her close, keeping them both warm with the cloak he received upon becoming a hunter.

The Waldgeist understands why he and his people must hunt, though she does not like it. She stays far away from the hunting parties when they go out and she does not speak of his absence when chases take him for days on end. Before they became the thing they are now, she would avoid him for a day and a night after returning with a kill. Now she just sighs and gives him sad looks.

She feels each loss of her forest keenly, and he aches for her pain.

She still accepts the furs he gives her though. Even if she does not like where they came from, the cold is coming early this year and she appreciates the warmth.

One day, as they sit on a log watching the morning sun melt the frost, she tells him the snows are coming.

“Stay with me this winter,” he wants to ask, but knows what she will say. The Waldgeist will not leave her forest, not until the High One takes her into the eternal sleep. So he brings her more furs, and the blanket his brother’s wife weaved.

He too should have a wife by now, but the spirit holds his heart, he cannot look at another woman without feeling like he has betrayed her.

After the snows fall, the whole forest is blanketed in a layer of white. As he stands in the middle of one of her fields, he aches at how silent it is. Now birds call, no creatures rustle in the bushes, no spirits giggle in the shade. There is only the crunch of snow under his feet and the sound of his breathing.

She is falling into her winter sleep when he gets to the cave she calls her home, nestled amongst the various furs he had given her, underneath the hanging charms they wove together in the summer. She is awake enough to blink silently at him as he sets about making a fire for the two of them. He knows that while she may be too tired to say anything she will listen if he speaks.

So speak he does.

He tells her the stories of his village, how they hold the ethereal Waldgeist in reverence close to that of the High One, blasphemous as it may seem to others. How they fear her and love her though, he laughs quietly, not as he loves her.

He feels the cold begin to seep into the cave as she falls asleep, her power diminishing as she stills. It causes a seed of anxiety to be sown in his belly, one he knows cannot be removed until she awakens again in the new year. She looks like a normal woman when she sleeps, and it scares him.

During winter, the Waldgeist does not stir. While the forest sleeps, so does she, for what good can she do while all that she governs is deep in cold snow? He visits her often, sits with her, cradles her, whispers his secrets to her, to remind himself that she is more than he could ever be.

He tells her of the music he hears in her voice, in the whistle of the trees, in the whisper of the flowers. He presses kisses to her face and head and hands, and holds her close to his body. When she sleeps he misses her. His heart hurts to be so close and so very far away from his earthbound goddess.

Occasionally snow keeps him away from her for days, and he worries for her. Sometimes it keeps him with her days. His brother worries for him, worries what nature might do to him, but he does not. If Nature loves him even half as much as he loves her, he will be safe. Even then, he would give up his life if she asked.

She wakes up only once, during the Solstice, the shortest day of the year. Her eyes glow bright with power, shining like green flames. She sleepily murmurs to him in a tongue he does not understand, but he does his best to listen anyway. He strokes her hair back as she talks, and takes immense comfort in how she pushes her face into his hand. She had never looked more other-worldly, and she has never looked more beautiful.

She falls back asleep once the day is done, and does not wake up again until the snows begin to leave.

When spring returns and the year beings anew, she awakens in his arms, and meets his smile with her own blinding one.

#Nature #Prose