I do not sleep, so I cannot rise. I’ve kept my eyes open since the day I was born, almost without blinking, for I have no kingdom in the land of dreams to call my own.

Have I therefore no soul? Am I therefore no man?

I sit alone and I watch the sun set. My brothers have already fled before, but I linger still to catch the dying rays, to feel the fleeting glow. And only when I see the purple fade from the horizon into deepest blue, and feel the force of darkness closing in around do I make my exit, leaping and exploding into fastest light, outrunning the sunset and the coming night.

So long as I keep in my father’s gaze, I know of no evil can harm me. I needn’t sleep, so long as sunlight bathes me. But on the dark side of the earth where Father rests with the newest bride, I cannot help but beware the darkness.

We do not sleep. Yet some day, we all must close our eyes. We know not when, but the very sun must one day blink out. Even Father cannot last. And one day light must fall to darkness.

But in the meantime, I will run, sprinting at the speed of light and bouncing off the moon, perhaps. Never to rest while the sun shines over me. Never to blink while yet I see the light.

One Wednesday, seven-year-old Jemima Sidney went into the woods to visit her tree. He was a nice tree. He reminded her of her grandfather, whom she’d seen two summers ago when she was five, but they hadn’t been back there because he lived all the way the other side of the country and they lived in Trinity’s Field, NC. But that was all right, because she had her tree and the tree smelled like her grandfather. And he talked like him, too.

Jemima’s mother was in real estate. That meant that she sold houses to people. Jemima often wondered what her mother would sell if she was in imaginary estate, but when she asked one time, her mother told her not to be silly; and another time, she told her not to be rude. Jemima also wasn’t sure how you could sell a house because it’s far too big to put in your pocket, see, but she also wasn’t allowed to ask that question. Her daddy was a lot easier to understand, because he didn’t sell houses; he built them. He often told her that made him and her mother a perfect pair.

When they had first moved to Trinity’s Field, NC, just after the last time she’d seen her grandfather, one day she decided to go out into the woods. It was easy because there were woods just behind their house and they went on for miles and miles. And she knew all about Little Red Riding Hood, but she wasn’t scared because there weren’t any wolves in this part of North Carolina, only bears and everyone knows that Goldilocks got away because bears only eat porridge.

But she didn’t meet a bear, because twenty-four yards from her house, she found a small clearing (called a “Glade”, Rembert told her) and that’s where she met Rembert the tree. At first, though, she didn’t really care about Rembert, she only really cared about the vine that was going up his trunk, because the more she looked at it, the more that vine seemed to shimmer and glow. And when she reached out to touch it, she could swear the vine moved.

“The Demno doesn’t like to be touched,” said a voice nearby.

Remembering the story of Little Red Riding Hood, Jemima gasped and turned, expecting to see the Wolf, or a Big Bad Bear behind her. But that wasn’t where the voice was from.

It was the tree that had spoken to her. It was easy to miss that it had a face in it, but once you saw it speak, it was unmistakable. His name was Rembert and he explained that he used to be a human boy, but he had given up life as a human more than a hundred years ago to live as a Dryad. A Dryad was a man in a tree, like Rembert. She got to be friends with him because she remembered where he was and she visited him and he explained to her another time that people needed Dryads so that they could communicate with the Demno, and the Demno was the shimmering vine that crept up the bark of his trunk and didn’t like to be touched.

“But why do people care about shimmery vines?” At first, Jemima thought it might have been a rude question and she scolded herself, but Rembert didn’t mind and he answered her.

“The Demno is very powerful,” he told her. “More powerful than most of us realize. It controls the fate of all of the trees and all of the flowers and plants on the planet. Most people don’t know the Demno because it hides from them—that’s how the Powers that Be want it…” He had been getting excited, but now he slowed down. “There are things out there more powerful than the Demno.”

Her parents didn’t approve of her talking to trees. That’s why she did it in private; when they weren’t looking, she’d sneak out, and be sure to be back before they noticed. But sometimes she would tell them things Rembert had said.

“Who’s Rembert?” asked her mother one time when she found herself listening to her daughter.

And Jemima explained that Rembert was the tree out in the woods—

“You’re not supposed to go out in the woods,” her mother reminded her.

“Oh, let her go,” her father spoke up then. “Don’t worry, we’ve got the whole place roped off, fenced in. Let her enjoy the woods while she still can.”

Jemima wasn’t sure what that last part meant, but she was glad it was safe to go talk to Rembert in the woods now.

So that Wednesday, she went out into the woods to talk to her favorite tree. But when she got there, she saw the strangest thing.

There was a man there, huddled on the ground in front of Rembert, and the man kept saying “Please… please, Demno, let me back in, oh! Praise be to Lord Gollobor, don’t make me do this!”

The man was wrinklier than her daddy, and his hair was wiry and grey, and he wore this big robe that kind of looked like tree-bark and leaves—and why was his voice familiar?

Then she looked at the tree and realized Rembert’s face was gone!

“Rembert!” she screeched, and the old man turned.

“Jemima,” he called to her. “Oh, my dear Little Miss Sidney. I wish you didn’t have to see me like this…”

Why did he know her name? And why did he have Rembert’s face? Slowly, it started to dawn on her why the Demno had cloven her favorite tree in two.

“I wish I could spare you this,” said Rembert, the man. “I wish you hadn’t come today, now, of all times, to this place. I wish you didn’t have to know.”

But she did know. She knew her best friend was no longer a tree—but she also knew he was sad, so she went up to him and put her arms around him.

“We’re just not powerful enough,” he sobbed. “Deals had to be made, sacrifices. If we didn’t give them this, they’d take it from somewhere else. But now they’ve made me human again.”

“It’s not that bad,” Jemima apologized. “Now you can move around, and you can dance with me!”

A curt laugh broke his sobs. “Yes, of course I will dance with you, but that… what are we going to do now? Now… where will I go? And what will become of the Demno and all of their trees?”

Once upon a time, there was a bird flying care-free through the air. Do you know the expression “as free as a bird”? Well, this was the very bird they meant when they said it. Each morning, she would wake up, ruffle her feathers, spread her wings and leap out of her nest, out into the world.

One day, though, it was raining. Now, rain didn’t generally mean that much, it just meant that she had to fly closer to the ground, that was all. She needed to be more careful about obstacles that might be in her path. But she could still feel the wind—a bit wetter, perhaps—hoisting her up and carrying her around.

The problem was that today of all days, the Cat living with the Humans next door to the Bird’s tree had decided that one bowl of food from his masters (or, as he called them, slaves) wasn’t nearly enough. He needed more food. And he didn’t mind feathers too much. So he clawed his way up the cabinet and over the sink and perched himself on the low-hanging branches that dangled in front of the kitchen window. Something was bound to come by.

Sure enough, within moments, the Bird came into view. It perched itself on one of the higher branches to rest for only a moment.

But suddenly, there was danger. The branches all around her started shaking, pulled down by the weight of the enormous cat flinging himself ever upwards, hissing and miauwing for his prey to do its job and come the rest of the way to him.

Of course, the bird wasn’t having any of that, so she took off, darting through the branches, branches that kept whipping from side to side, either from the wind or from the cat’s advances, until the bird decided it was safer to go down.

So down went the bird, to the cat’s great surprise, and swept, of all things, through the kitchen window, so that she now found herself in a new place. It wasn’t the open air and it surely wasn’t forest, either. It wasn’t even town. There were walls, it seemed, on all sides, closing in on her, no matter which way she flew. In one wall, there was an opening, but beyond that were more walls and just as little space between them.

How had she got here? What was this evil place?

In the third set of closed-in walls, she detected movement and perched herself up on a cabinet to watch. A little boy was playing with something on the ground. It looked like one of those huge metallic monstrocities that fly way up high and hurt when you hit them and make a terrible noise, but this one was much smaller, enough to fit in the little boy’s hand, and the little boy waved it around from side to side, making a noise that wanted to be the airplanes’ terrible racket when it grew up.

Then the little boy looked up and saw the bird.

“Birdie!” said the little boy.

Uh-oh, thought the bird. She knew all too well that humans couldn’t be trusted. So she launched herself off the cabinet and through the door, now even more desperate to find a way out and getting so utterly scared at the walls closing in that she was finding it hard to breathe. So she finally found the front door to the house and bent down next to the keyhole, where she could feel a very thin current of fresh air entering the building.

But the keyhole, sadly, was too close to the ground and the little boy caught her.

“Birdie!” said the little boy in its annoyingly high-pitched voice. “I don’t know why you’d fly away from me. I just want to put you in a cage, a little house all your own just like this one, and that way you can sing a pretty little song for me all day long!”

A cage? The bird tried to conjure up an image of this. It seemed like a space, just like this one, with walls all around, only smaller. A place where the bird could never fly, would never feel the freedom of the wind beneath her wings or even the crushing wetness of the whipping rain.

That was no way to live.

The bird, without another thought, jabbed her beak quite roughly into one of the hands that held her, making the little boy scream its fiendish little lungs out, distracting it for enough time that she could safely get away. At last, having come full circle, the bird returned to the kitchen and found the open window she had just come through and flew back outside—

–straight into the jaws of the cat.

Satisfied, the cat closed his jaws, sinking his teeth through feathers and flesh to her crunchy bones, just as the little boy entered the room and started howling.

“That wasn’t nice, kitty!” screamed the little boy. “I was going to make him my pet. He was going to be your brother!”

But the cat ignored him, enjoying the extra meal. If only the little boy knew how much happier the bird was there in the jaws in this beast than she would have been in a cage.