The dryad remembered when she outlasted the war for too long.

 

It made her soles throb, remembering her bleeding blisters burning against the coarse dirt as she clambered away from the aftermath of her contributions. Her frigid sweat couldn’t dissolve the crimson coat that spread past her besmirched hands; she felt tainted, and the salty tears she furiously wept didn’t cleanse her. The rain of ichor from the scorched nub that was her right arm continued.

 

The war ended, but even if the peacemaking signals fired in her brain, she couldn’t unearth any harmony within herself. Apart from death, the fallout that consumed her and her kind was a precedent for how divergent they truly were from a close-knit, homogenous collective. Differences existed; she sensed she was one of the vanguards in displaying them.

 

She recalled the fury of knowing that in some cases, like hers, the sinners never met their hamartia. Worse, she despised her reluctance to take her own life and pay for her defiance of nature. How dare she weep? How dare she run? How dare she stay alive? 

 

Not wanting to answer the complexities of her regrets, she had found herself binding to a soulless tree in a gunmetal expanse, reconciling with the simplicity that being a nymph entailed before the fallout. She wondered back then if removing herself from a soon-to-be-reformed world would protect it from the perils of her malevolent free will. She prayed that, for an indiscriminate duration, she would be nothing more than a tree spirit. Her wrongs would be righted if the devilish prayers preached by the likes of her were ever answered.

 

She stayed in spiritual stillness for endless years and became aware of the true meaning of being timeless.

 

“I’m super sorry if it was an off-putting question, Eve.” Rhea stammered, flapping her hands in front of her out of embarrassment. 

 

It had only been a few seconds since she asked. It was frightening how fast her memories hit her.

 

She loosened, but only slightly.

 

“No, it’s fine. My earnest apologies… for my confusion.” Evie carefully twirled the vine strands that hung from her bangs. “It’s as expected, to be frank: it feels bad.”

 

“Of course, yeah. Yeah.”

 

They allowed silence to take over again and let the quiet neurons blast further. 

 

Rhea read Evie’s instability quickly, but the dryad was left stumped by the sudden sense of warmth that drizzled on the naiad’s initial low spirits.

 

“I love both of them,” Rhea stated, the dryad giving her an attentive look. Evie didn’t take long to connect the dots; she abhorred the poignant relatability.

 

“Yes, you’ll outlive them.”

 

“I know. I know I’m still young, but… it’s still horrifying to think about, y’know?”

 

Evie could resonate with the tenseness as she watched the other nymph clutch the table tighter, eyes directed at her dozing husband.

 

“I hate knowing that I will live longer than my love” —she softly coddled Willo’s sleeping hand—”and probably see my son grow older than I’d expect.”

 

The dryad’s expression grew glassy; despite her endurance and sturdiness over countless years, she appeared as if she could shatter at any moment, like the lamenting naiad that sat near her. They were both nymphs; however, the space of time that Evie used to keep away from the reaches of society and both superior races was dedicated to her work aptitude. She spent untold time away from a family she had grown up with for so long, walking through the generational passage of time.

 

Surprised at the quickness, she felt oddly at home, still closer to these people than she had thought.

 

Then, as the naiad’s other hand graced her robotic one, she could sense that Rhea noticed her stiff posture slackening.

 

“Rhea… I—”

 

“I’m sorry if I’m throwing this all at you out of the blue—you’re always busy… so this always sits on my mind, y’know.”

 

Evie was shaken for a bit. She always knew that nymphs were connected, both in conversation and action. There was a supernatural order that compelled balanced and fair speech; this didn’t exist with Rhea’s interruption. 

 

The wood nymph realized that as much as she liked to con herself into thinking she was doing right, she felt behind. As she watched Rhea fidget shakenly in grief, Evie got hit with the realization of how much breaking such an order evoked the most passion out of someone.

 

“I’m not sure… but I heard that humans and nymphs agreed to have peace and promised each other many things.”

 

Evie caught on quickly, making swift connections after bursting out of her shock.

 

“Humans wanted nymphs to bring to the table their powers and environmental expertise,” Evie explained as she straightened herself to meet eye-to-eye confidently with her kind once in a while. “We wanted humans to reduce their environmental degradation, a shared contribution that helps more nymphs prosper and avoid death. However, it was agreed that… procreation was on the table and that the males of the human species could not only help our kind grow its numbers exponentially… but—”

 

“Yes, but my… my motivations are not of that agreement,” Rhea whispered with strained speech, her wet cheeks becoming more evident. “I married this man and had my son not because of some stupid responsibility or duty… but because I love them, Eve.”

 

The emerald in the dryad’s low eyes dilated. The final revelation wasn’t new; that wrote itself. It was more or less something else that sparked a flame that hadn’t been set ablaze in a while in her wooden soul. Rhea sank into her chair and beamed passionately at her sweetheart.

 

“It pains, y’know? I’m trynna be optimistic… I still have so much time… but it’s just—uh—”

 

The muffled weeping came, and by an instinct that was beyond the basics of nymphs’ unspoken empathy, Evie stood up.

 

She had to play the big sister, a role she remembered wearing on her sleeve for almost two generations.

 

No more unsentimentality. No more sturdiness. No more of this clown act.

 

“Rhea,”—Evie swiftly moved out of her seat to embosom the watering nymph while she was slumped on the chair—”you think so far ahead sometimes, you know.”

 

“I know, I know—sorry.”

 

“You don’t need to apologize… I guess it’s normal for you to have these thoughts.”

 

They let a calm silence wash over them like the enlivening water that sloshed onto Evie’s face from the naiad’s hair. There was still Willo’s blatant snoring and the comfortable silence of Beck’s much less clamorous sleeping in another room.

 

Everything felt right in the present.

 

“I… was taken in by Willo’s foster grandfather when he was nearing his 30s, if I’m correct—”

 

“Wha—really?”

 

Evie laughed heartily and continued, “I assisted in taking care of your hubby’s foster father too, and he grew up and adopted the little goblin at the time. Almost a decade of service to the Swoboda family.”

 

The dryad could practically feel Rhea’s agape look, unlocking from the embrace and gently placing both hands on the naiad’s shoulders.

 

“You’re old, Eve!—”

 

“And the sky’s blue.”

 

This time, she denied the order. Though they simply laughed to themselves. 

 

“Why would you say that it was a service?” Rhea asked, tipping her head upward to meet the dryad’s quizzical gaze. “You’re part of the Swobodas, you alien.”

 

Evie’s surprise kept stockpiling, and her mind went blank. The scenery suddenly became clearer to her: the family photos with her in them, the pastel sofas, and many more things that her closed world wouldn’t allow her to see. She reminisced about the times she joked, cooked edible miasmas, argued, catered, and rooted for the generations she took care of—most recently with Willo.

 

She underwent all that joy in cadence to her mission to cleanse her dues from the war; the inclination to benefit the humans took the form of a vow etched into her right arm.

 

That all seemed like a lie. The motivation seemed to become blurred ever since she was forced out of the comfort of her workshop by Willo. She figured it was too much exposure that made her mind go off-track from her true purpose for doing all these things—a derailment that she knew her conscience would regret down the line. 

 

However, as her pale face grew roseate at Rhea’s comment, she wondered if this exposure was truly evil or if this shift in the atmosphere was beneficial to her mission. 

 

This defiance of nature she built up. The deviation from rationality. Disregarding what she had become accustomed to was baffling to her, but it felt homely. The thought was too friendly. Dissonance caused her to go berserk 600 years ago. Though it was that dissonance that brought a twinkle to her eyes during this conversation.

 

The contradiction scrambled her thoughts and irked her to the core because an answer to her worries never seemed near.

 

She’d been stuck in this confusion for what felt like an eternity—a timeless downward spiral. She couldn’t decipher what she was truly working for anymore.

 

“Thanks, Rhea,” the dryad said calmly, a mellow look on her face regardless of her innate confusion. “I suppose to finally answer your question, just cherish them. I don’t think… there’s more to add to that.”

 

The neurons fired between them, and Rhea replied, “Same goes for you.”

 

The connection told them that they were in sync.

 

Cherishing: the nymphs’ proverb. The reminder made the dryad realize some of the true feelings that underpinned her devotion to not only the Swoboda family but to her work.

 

She further despised her internal dilemma. What did she feel? What was real? What was right?

 

She knew Rhea could sense the side of her that was scrambling over puzzle pieces in her mind, but Evie guessed that the other nymph assumed it was tiredness.

 

It was half-right. She was exhausted from these thoughts but grew more restless because she wanted answers. She wouldn’t turn tail and avoid consequences in a tree again after this current war; those over 300 years of stagnancy weren’t going to replay.

 

All this denial ached and throbbed in every corner of her mind. She almost longed for the days when she was still in her single digits and didn’t have to think for herself or make independent choices.

 

Then it clicked.  

 

She began blaming the one curse that had been the initial spark of all the successive uncertainty in her mind—the deceiving gift that had tapped her into uncharacteristic rage centuries ago.

 

It was the reason for the differences—the root of the disparities.

 

Evie didn’t know the true nature of it yet, but she knew how to structure this concept:

 

This thing is… beautifully disgusting.

 

I succumbed to it.