Revenant Tree
reprint from here:
Man, this sucked. Hours and hours of being stuck in this godawful intangible form and no cure in sight. At least he hadn't been exorcised yet, and somebody on campus had to be able to help him, so he may as well figure out what he was capable of in this form, right? Anything was better than going insane. With a long sigh that sounded more like the lonely wail of wind through willow-branches, he plopped down onto a tangle of nearby fir branches... and promptly sank thru. Right. Incoporeality.
But wait, he’d been able to push objects just using some kind of… intense concentration power earlier today, so maybe he could do it again on this tree? Worth a shot. He couldn’t do much else right now. Eyes wide, Caspar splayed his arms and phased into the trunk. A pause. Then a hollow spot in the tree flared twin points of electric blue as Caspar regained his sight. Two higher tree-branches rustled, twitched… and bent to his will. “I did it!” he crowed. But his excitement was short-lived.
---
Fir was feeling very content. Tired, sleepy and content. She dreamt that she was chasing someone’s back. What is ‘chase’? How can she when she is so very much rooted in place? She had the barest idea that this was wrong. That her path needed her to move forward. Always.
But, for now, she was content. Content to just stand in place and turn sunlight into energy. Energy to grow. Higher and higher. She felt a trickle of energy in one of her higher ‘limbs’ and felt them move and sway. Against the wind.
Wait. She can move? Against the wind? That has never happened before. Suddenly, she recalled. There was something she wanted to pursue. Someone she needed to reach. How can she if she cannot move?
Then the trickle faded and a cold wind blew in its place. And, once again, as per usual, her ‘arms’ bent in the direction of the breeze. And her ‘hairs’ were ruffled along with them. But the trickle did more than that. It made her remember.
If Fir had lips, she would have said ‘Do that again.’ She wanted to move once more on her own power. There was something she had to pursue.
Do that again.
The thought wasn’t his own, but Caspar had no idea where else it could have come from. There was no one here save for him and this tree - and trees couldn’t talk, right? Yet somehow he knew that errant thought did not come from himself. Was he going insane already? Not even 24 hours into this torture and he was already losing it; goodbye cruel world I never knew ye--
But something else had accompanied that strange thought. A desire to move, to pursue... something. Just what could a tree possibly want to pursue? Well, if he was going insane already, attributing thoughts and feelings to an inanimate tree of all things - at least that was a thought he could get behind. He’d give anything to move and feel like he had before all this... whatever this was... had happened to him; and if this tree was willing to let him control it? Well, he wasn’t complaining.
Twin pinpricks of cyan flared again as the vagrant ghost focused his energy. It was easier now to move his arm-branches, but of course he wasn’t going anywhere unless he had use of some leg-branches as well. But trees didn’t have have any--
Wait a minute. Roots.
Were he corporeal right now, he would be frowning intently as he stretched his awareness downward, seeking out the ends of the tree’s roots. Trees were no mere shrubs to be uprooted with hardly any effort, but he was still surprised to discover that its roots went much deeper than he’d expected. And down there, they were entwined with more life than he could ever imagine coming from one being. The raw energy there was... mouthwatering... Caspar shook an incorporeal head. What was he thinking? He was no plant, to subsist on mere sunlight and... whatever it was that lurked down there. But it would be a shame if he wrecked that vibrant life down there any more than strictly necessary.
Still, he wanted out of this cramped and lonely little room. And for however little it made sense, so did this tree.
Caspar focused. He was working against the indescribably metaphorical weight of several feet of compressed dirt and wood as well as his own inexperience with all this, but slowly, invisible to the surface-dweller’s eye, the tree's great roots began to twitch. He could feel small dots of energy rippling off like water off a newt’s back (and some part of him mourned their departure - a side effect of his present ghostly state?). Ignoring them, he pressed onward. More. More.
With a great gasp of cracking floorboard, Caspar’s fir tree uprooted itself, first on one side, then the other. He’d not realized just how strong those tree-roots were and nearly toppled over from the sudden weight now thrust into his inept incorporeal hands. He scrambled to pull himself and his tree back together (in another time and place, he might have marveled how the effort didn’t immediately tear him apart the way he’d done when this whole fiasco started), and just barely saved them from an irreversible fall. His feet lurched underneath him as if on the deck of a storm-tossed ship (or at least that’s what it felt like) for a long and sickening moment before finally steadying.
He’d done it. He was mobile.
... Well, he was unrooted, at least - but it was a good first step. Now came the hard part: “walking”. If he’d been able to save himself from falling over in this state, surely a few steps would be no trouble, yeah? Left... Right... Left... Right... Coordination was... difficult when he was working with trees and mana instead of his own good old muscle, but he managed to get into the swing of it somehow.
The door to Fir’s dorm at Garreg Mach burst open as if rammed from inside. Shaggy needlelike leaves poked over the threshold first, followed by spindly branches, then a trunk. Then a tangle of strong roots, twisted together in some woody semblance of legs. The tree behemoth lurched and tottered a few steps before its rhythm evened out.
Then it started out for the training grounds, and the cathedral bridge nearby.
