Chapter 494: Part of the Cycle
"We’re not the same as vampires," Heila said, taking Ollie’s hand in hers and giving him a reassuring squeeze as they watched Ashlynn drink in the energy her body so desperately needed to recover from her wounds.
"The whole world is a living, breathing thing," Heila explained. "There’s a little bit of magic in everything that shapes the world."
"You mean in every living thing?" Ollie asked, turning his attention away from Ashlynn to focus on Heila as he struggled to understand what he was witnessing. "Like the energy vampires feed on when they take blood? Sir Thane says that the reason vampires need to feed on people is because there isn’t enough ’vitality’ in beasts."
"Ignore vampires," Heila said, thinking back on all of the misunderstandings she’d had to clear up while learning because she’d been like Ollie, seeing the similarities that were only present on the surface without understanding how different things were underneath.
"I said everything that shapes the world," she said, repeating one of Amahle’s early lessons. "The wind has energy, the rocks have energy, the storming seas have energy. Everything that shapes the world has power, but that power doesn’t have any desires. The trees don’t want to do anything with their power, they just collect it and then they offer it up to others when they fall."
"But, doesn’t every living thing want to keep on living?" Ollie protested. "If she keeps going like this, and all the trees die, there won’t be a forest left here at all," he said, shuddering at the thought of clearing an entire mountainside of trees.
The Heartwood clan held trees to be sacred, and while they were building the village, the refugees from the village Owain burned worked very hard to identify the trees that were sickly, beginning to rot or who had poor conditions to grow in to be the first they felled while building the dam that would serve the village or harvesting trees for timber.
When they dug their burrows, they used the limbs of trees to weave together their walls and roofs instead of hewing their trunks into planks the way others did, felling as few trees as possible. Ollie hadn’t realized it at the time, but the more time he spent with Milo and his family, the more that reverence rubbed off on him until watching Ashlynn fell trees by the dozen filled his heart with a strange kind of distress that he’d never felt before.
"In a few days, Lady Nyrielle’s army will arrive, and trees will be felled to fuel their campfires and cook their meals. Orava village will grow in the years to come and more of these trees will be felled to build new long houses," she added.
"What Mother Ashlynn is doing is actually a kindness to the forest," Heila explained. "Now, the trees that were weakest will be the ones to fall. When the army arrives, we can send them to gather up the fallen timber instead of felling young, hearty trees. But there’s more to it than that," she added as she felt Ashlynn’s spell drawing to its final stage.
"Vampires exist outside of life and death, but in nature, the old must eventually die to make way for the young to thrive," Heila said. "If Mother Ashlynn was a cruel witch, she might not care about what comes after she takes what she needs, but she isn’t like that," Heila said proudly. "Watch," she whispered, pointing Ollie’s attention back at Ashlynn’s luminous figure.
Finally, when Ashlynn felt the last of the frozen and fiery energies that refused to allow her to recover naturally fading and flickering away, she lowered her wand and began the final verse with the faintest traces of lingering energy that clung to the ground around her.