i love you as certain dark things are to be loved; hickory

[hickory]

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.

hickory