Legend LXIX – The Tree That Saw

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The path, winding through the forgotten mountains like a pale scar on the flesh of the world, had led the wanderer eastward for four days without rest. Mist hung like sleeping veils between the rocks, and even the wind seemed unmoved. All was still, as if the land were listening for something that should have spoken long ago. Yet the wanderer pressed on, drawn by a premonition he could not put into words—a memory he had never experienced. At the fifth dawn, the valley opened, and the sky burned with colors shimmering between dream and waking. There, where the shadows thickened, it rose: the Tree That Saw. Some legends claimed it had not grown, but had been born when the world conceived its first thought. Its trunk was twisted like an ancient spiral, as if some ancient being had tried to transform itself into wood and had frozen halfway through. And in its center, nestled deep like a heart, lay the eye—large, cold, blue like frozen seawater under starlight. It did not blink. It did not rest. It waited. The wanderer stopped, unable to tear his gaze away. The eye did not simply look at him; it perceived him. It examined his footsteps, his unspoken words, the weight of his years, and the quiet certainty that one flees from some truths only because one does not know where else to go. The ground beneath his feet vibrated, as if the tree's roots were groping deep in the earth for his name. Lights glimmered among the branches—tiny, dancing stars, some flickering, some still, some like trapped sparks of a long-extinguished fire. Some seemed to be watching him. Others appeared like memories that had forgotten to whom they belonged. The wanderer stepped forward. The path leading from the tree wasn't made of earth, but of shimmering root veins that pulsed in the faint evening light. Each step felt like a decision. The closer he came, the more clearly he felt the pull deep inside, a resonance that wasn't physical. The tree recognized him. Not the wanderer he was—but all the possible versions of himself he could have become. When he finally stood before the trunk, the eye opened wider, a slow, gliding awakening that was more like a gateway than a being. And the wanderer saw—not with his eyes, but with his very core. He saw the paths he had left behind. The tenderness he had denied. The promises he broke as time carried him onward. He saw the love he lost, not because it was taken from him, but because he never dared to hold onto it. And he saw the shadows he left behind on others without realizing it. Everything lay open in the tree's gaze, naked and irrevocable. A voice rose—not in the wind, but in the silence between two heartbeats. “You have come because you no longer evade.” The bark before him pulsed gently, as if it were breathing.