If you look up when night falls and the moon is in just the right position and enough clouds are gathered, you will be able to see that the sky is made not of space or dark matter or any of the strange exotic things they tell you it is made of but rather that it is formed by a forest marching in from the edge of the world.
These are ghost trees of course. I don’t need to tell you that. Not at your age. You’ve climbed enough trees of the ordinary kind to know the difference. Your trees are a sort too heavy with children and rogues swinging on them to float nightwards.
Ghost trees are trees that used to be. Cut down at night, they migrate naturally toward areas of the planet we have not yet touched and know nothing about in order to continue growing although, truth be told, they no longer can be harmed by our tiny axes and feeble flames.
It is a slow spread however, slower than the sequoia and slower, almost even than mountain ranges as though they have read ahead to the end of the world and chosen to take their time. It must be hard to turn away from sheltering us, no matter what we do to them.
Such reluctant growth does not, however, still the need to fill the form they were promised a thousand years before you and I ever thought to climb one; and definitely a thousand years before you and I ever thought to carve a boat.
Bound then by night, these trees grow without fear, choking the stars and piercing the moon.
True, the day sends them back, the sun, bleeding though it is, still has power to sweep away their claws but they know that blood will one day drain and the trees that need no sap and take no saw will become one tree upon which will hang the world.
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