Blind and whistling just around the corner
And there's a wind that is whispering something

Strong as hell but not hickory rooted

To the girl who would rather eat her own flesh than submit to Famine, the thing – the things – had said, and inside her something bloomed.
Inside her was a seed, a thing apart from her history, unburdened by the weight of it. Inside her was a power – not a power given to her by her parents, not a thing borne from blood, but a thing uniquely hers, a thing earned as she swallowed seals and the world thundered to an end around them.
Plants bend to her will, grow and wilt as she decrees it. She grows flowers in her mane, blowing life back into them when they begin to wilt.
(She doesn’t know which she likes more – the creation, or the destruction.)

She grows a tree – a hickory, her namesake. She thinks it’s in honor of something or someone but no names come to her lips because there is no one, not anymore. Hickory is the last in a long line of lasts, she is childless, without lovers or even friends.
(And once there had been a mare who smelled like the earth or the grave and Hickory sometimes remembers how she’d felt.)
The tree is a touchstone. The tree is where she carved the seals, to remind herself that it was not a dream. That there had been seals shattered and melting in her mouth as she bled for a cause, for a purpose.
(She had been so hungry, and ate her own flesh so she’d have something to spit in their face.)

She is quiet under the tree but all around her twigs snap, and someone’s breaths huff hot in the stillness of the night air.
A demand, made to the wind: Who goes there?
Strange, she almost knows the voice. Almost remembers how it once said her name.
She could grow nettles between them, foxglove, an array of beautiful poison stretching between them. But she does not. She is not a fearful thing.
Instead, to the wind and the demanding voice, she says, “Hickory.”

Blind and whistling just around the corner
And there's a wind that is whispering something

Strong as hell but not hickory rooted

She is not from a line meant to love; or so it feels now, as the years echo past and add weight to her bones. Of those who made her, some were lovers, some were not, but they all died fast, snuffed out as candles in the wind.
She’d embraced an anhedonic life, drifting through the years like a water-bug skimming the surface of a lake. She felt little, if anything – no love, but no hate, either. No sadness. She merely was.

But that had changed, with the lamb, with the gods or demons that came after.
She swallowed seals and fought for something, her flesh torn to ribbons and the taste of stone in her throat. She’d laughed, even, laughed while war and famine and death stood as corporeal things before her, crying havoc.
She’d cried havoc too, and let slip her own dogs of war – her laughter, a fearless unplumbed.

It seems almost like a dream now, but there are scars that haunt her bay hide. They force away the apathy she’d let sit in a thick veil across her. The scars keep her here as she grows her touchstone tree and says their names.
As she says her own, to the wind, to the stranger – who echoes it back in a voice that is not so strange. Chimes it, like bells, then says it again.
She knows that voice.
The voice that reminds her of gravdirt and strange warmth. If you’d asked her she’d say she’d forgotten the mare’s name but her tongue says otherwise because she says it in a tumble of confusion and a breath of something like excitement.
“Loam?”

Blind and whistling just around the corner
And there's a wind that is whispering something

Strong as hell but not hickory rooted

Yes, murmurs the mare and Hickory suddenly feels strange, dizzied. She is supposed to be shedding her past like snakeskin, but here creeps a mare who once haunted it for a few warm hours, here comes a mare arisen from nothing, who has no blood-burden on her back.
There are flowers in her hair, ones she grew. She is different, and she nods slightly when the mare asserts so. Yes, she is different. This iteration of Hickory has faced strange demons, tasted her own flesh so she might spit it back in Famine’s face. This iteration has faced death’s stony stare, has fought in a battle she was damned to lose.

She survived it (she’d died, there, and woken up here, in the strange rhythm of Beqanna’s time and realms). She’d survived it and come out of it with a newfound power, the ability to grow her trees, her plants.
She is nervous, unsettled, because the past should be the past. She makes the grass tall beneath their feet, rattles the branches of her hickory tree.
“So are you,” she says, finally. Loam’s differences may not be so pronounced as hers, but there is a difference there nonetheless, the differences bequeathed to her by years and experience.