The Last Stand of Daronwy Read Online Free PDF Page A

forest. Shoo-wheet! That was Dad’s call. Jeremy inhaled the bouquet of sulfur on the cooling wind, warning of the storm’s resurgence, and slid down the trunk of the great tree, his arms windmilling for balance. He ran across the trails south of the pond, through the bike ramps in the front forest of Twin Hills, and out onto the streets. It started to rain harder as he sailed across the concrete and into his garage. His dad stood there, watching the drops fall. “Time for supper.”

    In the beginning, the wind gave names to all things beneath the gaze of the Creator. Like all trees, Daronwy’s grove used those names for themselves, for all life that connected to the unending web. Driven to name everything in their miniaturized world, humans did not listen, did not even believe that there were names for all things before their eyes opened to the sun. And so, Daronwy watched as Jeremiah wandered beneath branch and bough, scratching out names for them on his pad of recycled bark. Some names the sapling did not bestow. For many seasons, the children had called the northern edge of the forest Helter Skelter. That edge had seen the worst of the destruction in the fire and it had grown back twisted by the tree-brethren’s hatred of humankind and determination to keep humans out of their realm.
    The forest had been called Twin Hills for longer than the North had its own name. Two small, melting rises of clay, left over from the excavated abomination and baked hard in the fire, stood to the south and east of the pond. Their existence in an otherwise flat landscape gave Twin Hills its human name. Jeremiah called the pond Algae Pond for the ubiquitous fluorescence that dotted its shallows, concealing its black origin—an origin he did not know was linked to the tar pit on the pond’s northern bank. Charred remains of brethren still lay half-buried in that foul muck. Poisoned and cursed, nothing grew there. It was the one place the trees could not reclaim; they could only surround it in blackberry and briar.
    Daronwy remembered the names of the fallen. Two hundred seasons ago, their dying screams pierced the wind as their mutilated bodies were nailed into a tower the humans believed could puncture the very bark of Earth herself. Her black sap gushed forth, igniting a venomous inferno. Vengeful flames decimated the tower and left all those on its north side a smoking ruin. The remaining cavity became the pond with an apologetic upwelling of water. Screams of the burned and fallen still shimmered in the shadows where the wind would never reach. These old memories stoked Daronwy’s hatred, and vines across the forest twisted tighter in accordance with his bitter thoughts. But a quaint breeze sang of peace. Jeremiah stood at the edge of the pond, drawing furiously and crossing each line out. Seasons must cycle so quickly to these fickle beings, spurring them into a furious rush toward a future they imagined they could control.

    The paper was scuffed and worn thin by the eraser. Everything depended on the shape of the pond. He stood atop one of the twin hills, screwing up his face to stare at it a different way. It was roughly oblong, but flattened along the edge it shared with the tar pit. He erased it again, and did not hear Travis and Lee crunching along the sandy area between the pond and the tree’s thicket that he had just named the Mini Desert.
    â€œWhatcha doing?” Travis asked.
    Jeremy glanced up, startled. “Nothing.” He stuffed the pencil into his jeans pocket and started to look for a way down the hill.
    â€œWhat’s on that paper?” said Lee.
    â€œNothing.”
    â€œGive it to me.” They stopped at the base of the hill and Travis stuck his hand out.
    Jeremy eyed the drop off the sheer edge. It was six feet at most. Six feet into the sand of the Mini Desert. He could do it. “No.”
    â€œGive it to me!”
    â€œNo, it’s mine.” Jeremy