Chapter One

I’m finally posting this first chapter. As y’all know, it’s not a finished version. This one has more, um, personality in it. Tre-erde is my version of a literary fantasy novel. Our main character, who you’ll meet in this second part, is on the one hand on an emotional journey to make sense out of the numerous deaths in her life, while on the other hand, she’s seeking trust from others. That’s my interpretation. The plot unfolds from there. In addition, there’s a side story which starts below.

On any level, I’ll wind up posting up to three chapters here and then begin posting many additional chapters on my Patreon. Details will be there. You can find me somewhere online and ask questions.

DeYoung strolled across the quietness, across the acres of gated dry land that his father had left him. He made this trip to the circle of trees thousands of times in his lifetime, enough times that his knees hurt if he walked there without stopping. His heels suffered in these old leather boots. Fifty-two years of age tugged on him, constantly pressed him to the ground, pushed him over mole hills and grass yellowed by the constant berating of a summer sun. His father never drove out this way, but he might start soon enough.

His grandfather had planted those trees to hide what he simply called “The Place”. The trees at The Place were full grown, and to this day, hid nothing. The oldest, most childish part of DeYoung had a few stories told by his grandfather left in his head about buried bodies that hadn’t arrived yet, which sounded ominous but made no sense. He celebrated his father and grandfather by reminiscing on the stories of his family tending the soil.  

He stopped at the halfway mark between the small home his grandfather built and The Place. He set his foot on a log he helped cut down decades ago when their land was littered with felled trees. Then he listened. No cars would come this way, not at this time in the evening. Earlier in the day birds might rustle in the trees but not now. He listened for the ocean, just like he was taught. Listen in the summer, in the evening when it’s quiet, before the sun completely dropped. The ocean everyone knew about was two hours away. However, the ocean his family told him to listen for would supposedly arrive at The Place. The ocean that would one day arrive was why his grandfather planted The Place. He listened for that ocean, not out of belief in such a thing, but because this is what he had done as a child. Doing it made him feel part of something other than himself. The trained action was to listen for the ocean. Instead he listened to the silence of an area overwhelmed by miles of hills, a vast sky, cattle, and a two-way road that snaked through it all. 

Lacking the motivation to trek the rest of the way to The Place, he headed back to the house where his mother had died, where his father had died, and where he might decide to do the same. He took his aging feet and memories to his sometimes weekend home where this evening he read, made dinner, bathed, read some more, and found himself in bed at a reasonable hour.

He woke in the middle of the night to the commotion of wind and squawking seagulls. He leaped out of bed in his boxer shorts, hopped across the wooden bedroom floor and leaned out the window, ear turned to the sky. The salt in the crisp air. Squawking of seagulls. Just maybe he wanted to hear the waves so badly that he imagined them. For all he knew, the waves could have been wind blowing through the trees. 

He dressed. Stepped outside, hustled toward the sound of waves crashing into rocks or pummeling something. At the halfway log, although he could run no farther, he kept to his hustle, allowed his knees to slow him but not stop him, allowed his heels to frustrate him but not digress his thoughts. Sweat beaded his forehead. His skin itched. Approaching the circle of trees to The Place, he anticipated seeing an unfulfilled promise from his childhood. 

Despite the trees’ thickness, at their zenith the most gentle breeze swayed their tops in the shadow of dense moonlight. Holding his chest and concerned about collapsing, he dragged his feet through the trees to an area consumed by ocean water that crashed against the surrounding trees, tumbled across the ground. The water sizzled while being sucked back out to his left and through an opening where the tallest and widest of the trees had disappeared. The circle of trees worked as a kind of cage for this wild water. Someone had removed the largest tree here. Where the tree had been acted like a jeti, as the water smashed into it, drifted in, but most of it left out there. The ocean of another world where the sun shone at mid-day. He gasped, held his breath, and then laughed like a child who volunteered to be tickled. Such gorgeous sunlight on such a warm day, sitting right here in the middle of the night on his family land, a place where he had always been but never believed existed…

Part 2

Janae dug her slender fingers into the cool soil and gazed up at the tall tree that had once been her mother. A smaller than average sized tree compared to the others in the Tre-wood Forest. “Deluth.” Janae whispered her mother’s name, knelt in a pile of leaves. Each fallen leaf thinner than any other leaf outside of this forest. Despite their thinness, they were as heavy as her sandals. Smooth, bent branches, like rebuffed, lacquered wood, hung overhead. Most of her mother’s leaves would turn orange and then yellow before returning to the soil. “Thank you for the strength.”

Her mother’s tree, as well all as other trees in the Tre-wood Forest, were formed from the merits of their personality. No tree grew with the same nuance. Each one had its own meaning and timing. Once dead and in the Tre-wood, you were undoubtedly seen, you would undoubtedly bloom. 

Deep white grooves in her mother’s tree trunk formed a fingerprint that wrapped around it. The print, beginning high above Janae’s head, ended at the soil where she clenched her fingers into tight, angry fists. Her mother had been misunderstood as much as she herself had been misunderstood.

Soft dirt and grime had gathered underneath Janae’s chipped nails, gathered between her fingers.

She’d have been honored to turn out like her mother in the flesh or as a tree. She and her mother didn’t look alike, not a horrible thing to accept. Janae was told her high cheek bones came from her father, a man originally from Waterloo, who never returned from his journey to Kahlil and the sea. She had his rebel heart, wide nose and deep brown eyes. Her long hair came from her mother, the kink in it from her father, so she understood. Without question, Janae inherited her mother’s temper, her mother’s heart, her mother’s voice and bones.

“I honor you, my mother, my friend…”

Nobody understood why Deluth married a man who did not love her, a man from another place who did not share the values of Tre-erde. A man who had stopped, essentially for a few years, while on his way to another place. Why fall for something like that? Why not have self-control, was their general thinking. In the end, her father fulfilled his personal journey and never returned. It just happened that he did so while Deluth was pregnant with her. His actions did not stop her mother from loving him. It did not stop Janae from silently growing in regard to him.

A few trees over from her, Legeres, the doctor, one of the smartest people in Tre-erde, had been paying homage to one of his long planted relatives. He and his wife conversed with one another, not at all in awe at the tree that had grown from a loved one. They looked like they were on a casual walk through any other wood. Those two, and those like those two who lived atop the mesa took most things for granted. They had responsibilities to Tre-erde but they didn’t use their hands for Tre-erde, they didn’t clean and trade and sweat with the rest of Tre-erde. They were important every day, though absent daily.

If Legeres and his wife cared as much as most had, they’d swoon over how their friend’s leaves dripped beads of sap so slowly that it appeared to be more like mishandled string, as the hundreds of wet beads stretched from the leaves to the ground but never broke. When she touched them herself, they were strong as rope and wet through and through just like tree sap should have been. If Legeres and his wife paid attention, they’d see the tiny veins inside the sap, they’d see their friend’s personality somehow manifesting from a seed they left behind at death.

The two, after glancing at her, started out of the Tre-wood and back towards the market.

She stood, got a final look at her mother’s tree, slowly stuffed a handful of her mother’s leaves into her overall pockets.

 “You know better,” she heard Legeres’s wife Quenne’s smooth and even voice say.

She dropped the leaves, grinned at Quenne and Legeres. A disguised sneer. People weren’t allowed to pull nature from The Tre-wood Forest. What fell to the forest floor stayed on the forest floor. Time would do with it as it would and should. According to Quenne and Legeres and those on the mesa, The Tre-wood needed The Tre-wood to remain in The Tre-wood.

Strands of tangled frizzy hair fell down the side of her face. The rest of her hair, in dark, knotted braids, fell down her back. She did what she could to tie it in a bun and keep it away from her neck. It’s not only today’s heat and humidity that proved oppressive. Tomorrow would be challenging, as would be the day after that and the day after that.

She took a route out of The Tre-wood that didn’t make her follow Legeres and Quenne but was also familiar. Some trees she wanted to avoid. The tree that bled from its roots kept her from taking a more direct path out. Instead, she meandered around it passing the tree that, at this time of day, she could see the grooves in the scabs that made its bark. A horrible sight she’d rather avoid. This person probably died violently or had a violent heart. Or it was someone she didn’t want to know or didn’t want to fully know.

The route she often found led her across the tree of an acquaintance’s grandfather. Daneel had been so proud of his grandfather and detailed the meaning behind so much of his grandfather’s tree that envy always slowed her when she saw it. To be a proud Tre-erdian and not just a person from Tre-erde… To be accepted…

She stopped to again examine the tree of an acquaintance’s grandfather, a man who contributed to Tre-erde being a better place. The man used his hands to help make the tubing that allowed water to run from the mesa down the hill to the bath house where plenty of Tre-erdians gathered water for their homes or did things there for their homes. The tavern had alcohol named after Daneel’s grandfather, an expert hunter of bastion.

Envious. All her mother and father contributed to Tre-erde was herself and unease. In the meantime, Daneel’s grandfather’s tree grew more dense than any other, bark as thick as a person’s body. A hollow trunk as wide and long as a small tunnel.

She slipped her sandals on, ready to depart The Tre-wood. From here on, the ground would become dryer, would become laced with thorns from weeds, would be littered with dirt rocks and sticks with sharp ends. She maneuvered around a tree that instead of morning due, it sweat, another tree pooled mucous near it’s shallow roots. Another one constantly wavered in the breeze of its own environment, gave off the aroma of something from a beautiful place, she had no idea what place.

Other trees were thoroughly useful. They grew fruit that Tre-erde didn’t always trade. Apples. Oranges. Avocado. Pomegranate. Bananas. It all grew in The Tre-wood, naturally or from a soulless seed, nobody concerned themselves with the difference.