I found myself inspired by a piece of a good friend of mine, ~arracraidira. This is my full response to his piece, Wolf Lichen.

Light is often claimed to be the saving oposition to Darkness. I have spent so many winters breeding this topic to fruition. The darkness was seeded from the pain of my herritage; from a turmoiled end to a lifetime of unwinded care. I have often times blamed Man in the same facet as my elders, but can never bring myself to let that hatred consume our worls, and bleed into another. During the early years of war, by our standards of age, and not Man's, a young boy came across me. I was young enough to witness the dark initiation of our dispute, felt the shock of another fallen brother or sister in the greed of these creatures; but was not old enough to forgo the influence this child gave me.

He had wandered into the breadth of trees in his freedom, and had lost his way. He stumbled across me, and rested himself at the base of my trunk, hanging a small lantern from one of my loose branches. He fell asleep in the warm summer night, and his slumber broke me in clarity forever more. What at first I thought were ramblings of a child, were words of a tale exposed in his sleep. He described in great detail the thanks he held to my kind, for protecting them, for giving them warmth in the coldest of nights, for sheltering them from the heat of the day, and for our beauty and power which invokes all emotions of grandeur. He told a tale of his father, and a great Giving Tree, which has made his family thrive in sync with the Earth. In alliance, and not dispute.

The child awoke dazed in the middle of the night, clearly distressed over some matter which I found myself caring greatly for. He stumbled and ran aimlessly in terror. I never saw him again since that night, and when I recieved word through the leaves of his death before the next dawn, I became enraged. My own family led the boy to his death, by giving him no path home, and canvasing the forest ground in darkness to blind him. It was this insolent act of darkness which drove me to take the stand this child never could. I took his dying lantern, which left hung on my branches, and grew it into me. I gave so much of my own lifeforce to keeping it lit, that from powers beyond my comprehension, it became part of me. Every so often, I grow another branch of light, in imitation of its original, with hopes to breech the darkness and the suffering it breeds. I will be here as a beacon for hope, no matter how strong the darkness becomes around me, I still have the Sky above me, and the Earth below me, and the Heart within me.

And I know, as small as I am, the light will never die.