It was changing now, that was true. I was going into the tree, as much as the tree was coming into me. It did not feel any gentler. It felt as if the nerves that had once webbed through my hands and feet were now being forced throughout the stiffness of the tree. Little ripped bits of me were being torn away from their old places and forced into new and foreign locations. In the most fitting of reversals, I felt I was being torn down into a sort of lumber and rebuilt as a tree.

“Let go of your old body,” Lisana was urging me. I wanted to tell her that I didn’t know how but I no longer knew how to speak to her. I was starting to feel new sensations but I was not sure how to interpret any of them. Was that wind? Sunlight? Was that the comforting grip of soil upon my roots? Or was it sandpaper against my flesh, light shining in my eyes, a terrible shrilling in my ears? This body didn’t fit my senses or my senses didn’t fit this body. It was all a mistake, a terrible mistake. I wanted it to stop, wanted to simply be dead, but there was nowhere I could turn for help.

The changes went on, and on, and on. For what seemed like a very long time, it was hard to think. It is always hard to form cogent thoughts when in severe pain, but that small voice that seems to keep babbling in the mind when the larger, controllable voice falls silent, even that one was absent. Thoughts happened in bits and made no sense even when put together, like scattered pieces of a book’s torn pages.

My awareness was being fused with the tree’s life. Leaves turning toward the sun. Roots taking up water. Leaf buds slowly unfurling. Very gradually, I began to be aware of this new body’s senses and needs. It had a different sort of awareness of the world. Light and temperature and moisture were suddenly far more significant to me. For a fixed creature, these things matter so much more than to something that is mobile and can seek out what it needs. I became aware that to live I had to harvest all resources within my reach. With the nutrients from my old body, I could grow taller, produce more leaves. I could capture more of the sunlight streaming down from above, and I could shade the ground beneath me to make it harder for competitors to sprout. I wanted next to nothing growing beneath my reaching branches. The leaves I dropped there were my nutrients, to rot and nourish my own roots. I wished to benefit from all the moisture that fell within the range of my reaching roots, not share it with competitive life. It was only when I found myself thinking that in many ways a tree was not so different from a man that I realized I was using my mind again.

“Nevare? Are you there now?”

Her voice reached me in a new way. It came from the wind rustling her leaves, and more intimately, from the fallen trunk that we shared. I reached for her and found her. It was like clasping hands, and then it was far more than that.

“You’re finally here. All of you. All the way here.”

“Yes. I am.” It was so easy to be completely aware of her. I had not known, before, that we had been shouting to one another across such a distance. Now when she spoke, her thoughts blossomed effortlessly in my mind. She had been the one reaching out to me, manifesting in a human shape that I could recognize in order to reach me. I had seen and comprehended only the tiniest fraction of what she truly was. Now I saw all of her. Lisana as tree was as lovely and seductive as Lisana as woman, and she was both. She was such a being, such a glorious life. I had never seen a person in such full spectrum. It was the difference between seeing a garden by torchlight and then beholding it in all its color and detail on a sunny day.

“Look at yourself,” she commanded me, pleased with the unspoken flow of compliments I had directed at her. “Just look at what you are becoming.”

My little tree had already put the harvested nutrients from my body to work. New twigs had formed, fresh leaves budding on them, and the leaves I’d had were a deeper green and larger. I stretched them toward the light and wind, marveling that I could do so. I felt the sun kiss my leaves, enjoyed the light wind that stirred them, felt even the weight as a large bird alighted in my branches. I felt him shift his weight, felt the lick-lick of his strong beak as he whetted it against my branch. Then he spoke.

“Hello, Nevare. I’ve come to collect a debt.”

It was the voice of a god, trickling through me like cold blood mingling with warm. Orandula, the Old God. God of balances, god of death. He was a darkness there in my branch, his claws digging into my bark, his body hiding my leaves from the sunlight. A wave of foreboding shivered through me.

And yet, what could he do to me now?

“What can’t I do to you now?” he replied to my unspoken thought. “Over and over, I’ve given you the chance to make the choice. Pay for what you took. You can give me a death or give me a life. I even offered to let you give me the boy. But over and over, you’ve refused the opportunity to make things right with me.”

“I think it’s too late for you to threaten me,” I replied sanguinely. “I’m already dead.”

“Are you?” He hopped closer to my trunk. I could almost feel him cock his head and stare at me. He pecked at my branch. It made my leaves shiver. “Do you feel dead?”

“I—” I didn’t feel dead. I felt more alive than I had in a long time. For a few brief moments, I’d felt free, entering a new existence.

“Whatever you are. Do not take him from me.” This came as a low-voiced plea from Lisana. “We have been through so much, sacrificed so much. Surely the magic cannot demand more of us than what we have done.”

“Magic?” He shifted the grip of his black bird-feet on my branch. “I care nothing for magic. I do care for debts. I do not forget them.”

“What do you want from us?” Lisana demanded of him.

“Only what I’m owed. And I’ll even give you, one last time, the choice. Choose now, Nevare Burvelle. Choose what you give me. Or I’ll take what I please.”

“What does he mean, a life or a death?” she cried to me.

“I don’t know. I think he finds it funny to play with the words. Gernians speak of him as an old god, one most of them have set aside. Few worship him anymore. When he is worshipped, he is the god of death. But also of balances.”

“It makes great sense,” Orandula interrupted. “How can one be the god of death without also being a god of life? It isn’t as if they are two separate things. One is the discontinuation of the other, don’t you see? Whenever one stops, the other begins.” He shifted on my branch. “They balance.”

“So if he asks you for your life, then you are giving it to him and choosing death?” Lisana spoke only to me.

“So I’ve supposed. I don’t really know and he won’t explain.”

The god laughed. “Explaining would take all the fun out of it. Besides, even if I explained, you still wouldn’t understand.”

Lisana was beginning to be frightened. We had just thought that we were finally safe. “What if you offer him your death? What happens then?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can’t you just ask him?” Lisana sounded amazed that I would not have done so long ago.

“I don’t think he would answer that question. I think he finds it amusing to demand a price of me when I do not know what I am agreeing to give him.”

With a sigh like wind through new leaves, she brushed past me to confront him. “If he offers you his death, what do you take?”

“Why, his death, of course.”

“So you would kill his tree, then?”

I felt him shift his weight and suddenly I could see him. It was a different way of seeing. I knew the shape of him and how he blocked the light from my leaves. He’d cocked his head at Lisana’s tree. “No. Of course I wouldn’t kill him. That would be giving him death rather than taking death from him.” The bird puffed his feathers with a shiver, then settled them and began grooming them again. “I’m not going to wait much longer,” he warned us.