Free Crow - The Awakening by Michael J. Vanecek Page A

before actually touching the tree. It was quite solid, very much a real tree. But without a hint of life. The wood was dry and split in several places along the grain. He looked up toward the top and imagined it as it would have looked alive. For some reason, what he saw in his imagination wasn't quite like the pine trees of the forest, but more tropical looking. "Weird," he said under his breath as he shook his head to clear the imagined look of the tree out of his head. He walked around the tree with his hand on it, feeling the wood. The bark had long since weathered off, leaving the core of the tree exposed to the sunlight. It was smooth and lifeless, and still cool from the chill of the night before. He almost felt sorry for it, like a long lost friend. He felt a distinct connection to all the living things of the forest and sensed only the shadow of possibilities in what this tree had been.
    Standing back, he looked up again. Most of the branches it had in life were gone, but there were still many jutting out of the trunk. As he did in the wintertime when all was dreary and dead, he tried to imagine the tree alive again, with bark on it and a full, living canopy. Birds would flitter amongst the branches, and squirrels would traverse up and down the trunk. Steven smiled. Much better, and far less intimidating. Still, it was different. Not quite like the conifers that grew in the forest around him. The difference was a little disconcerting. He wondered why he was having trouble seeing the tree as one of the many that surrounded the meadow.
    He looked around the meadow, decidedly sad-looking this late in the season. The grass was turning splotchy brown and many of the annual flowering plants were showing their age with tired leaves and fewer flowers. A fresh flush of spring growth complete with flowers and butterflies would fix that. Steven imagined a vibrant living meadow. His head hurt a little and he rubbed the back of his neck but still continued to visualize what the meadow would look like at the prime of the growing season and superimposed that over what he was looking at now. Suddenly, the scary meadow of his dark dreams melted away into a beautiful clearing full of life and vitality.
    Oddly, the meadow also looked off. Steven didn't recognize any of the plants any more than he recognized the living tree. Even the butterflies looked different. Maybe he really was losing his mind. He looked up and noticed that the sun looked different and there was a second moon in the sky. "Wow. I have to draw this." Steven sat down and turned his sketchpad to a blank page and started drawing what his imagination had created in place of the tree and meadow around him.
    Steven held the sketch away from him, examining it. It was missing something. It needed a human ingredient. Perhaps a little girl dancing amongst the aromatic flowers. He sketched her with care for detail. She had short, wild hair. A puff of hair on her crown stood straight up like a flower, and hair that draped down to her shoulders and across her eyebrows framed a very pretty face. It was brown and thick with blond highlights and had leaves and perhaps even a twig in it from the trees she surely climbed in. Large, beautiful green or perhaps blue eyes and pointed ears are a must as well as a small, smiling mouth and petite nose. She was also thin and would roughly be his age, of course. Her clothing looked very well suited for forest life - just enough to cover what needed covering but no frilly stuff to get caught up in the underbrush. He thought of drawing in a bow and arrow as was commonly drawn on Elves he'd seen illustrated in library books, but he just couldn't seem to make it fit in his vision. He focused hard on his drawing, giving it exquisite detail. The Elf's skin would be very slightly fuzzy, almost like a very fine short fur. He wasn't sure why, but it just seemed natural for her. It still didn't look quite right to him. He worked on the fur a bit, drawing