Chapter 6 Faelan
Faelan
The man called Randy was talking.
He had been talking for some time now, and his voice rose and fell with the kind of conviction only men like him could muster. I let him.
“So what do you think?” He shifted the carved wooden token in his hands. “You spend more time out here than any of us, Falen. You get it. You feel it, right?”
“And what is it I’m supposed to feel?”
Randy grinned, eager, mistaking my amusement for encouragement.
“The pull of something greater. The rhythm of the land, the changing of the seasons, the energy that ties us all together.” He gestured to the people around us, though most of them weren’t paying him any mind.
“We’re all part of it, whether we realize it or not. ”
“That much is true.”
His chest puffed up. “Exactly. And that’s why we need to honor the equinox. The Green Man isn’t just a symbol, you know. He’s real.”
I raised a brow. “Is he?”
Randy nodded. “Of course. He’s the cycle itself, the living embodiment of nature’s wild balance. And when we call him, when we open ourselves to him, he answers.”
I watched him, considering. “Has he answered you?”
Randy hesitated just long enough to make it clear the answer was no. “Well—not yet. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? People don’t believe anymore. They don’t listen. But I do. I try.”
His sincerity struck a nerve.
It wasn’t his fault. Mortals have always wanted to reach for something beyond themselves, to grasp at the unseen and give it a name. I had met men like him before, in ages past, wearing different clothes, speaking different words, all of them asking the same thing—to be seen.
I almost pitied him. Not because he called to the Green Man, but because he didn’t realize the Green Man was already before him.
I let the silence stretch between us, just long enough for Randy’s certainty to falter, just long enough for him to start filling the space with another explanation—
And then I felt it.
Not the forest, nor the shifting of spring in my bones.
Her.
Samantha came toward me, moving through the gathering with focus in her stride and a look of great purpose on her face. I didn’t let my gaze linger too long, but something in me stirred all the same.
Randy, unaware, launched into another declaration about the importance of energy and intention, but I wasn’t listening anymore. Samantha stepped between Randy and me, all tangled emotion and expectation.
“Back so soon?” I teased. “I must’ve made an impression.”
She crossed her arms. “Don’t look so smug about it.”
I smiled, slow and knowing. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
She huffed, but there was no real bite to it.
Then, before I could say anything else, she launched into something entirely unexpected.
“I know what you’re thinking.” Oh, I sincerely doubted that.
“I don’t belong out here. And you’re right—I don’t.
But I do belong somewhere, and that somewhere just happens to involve a lot of people who really know how to ruin a moment.
” She glared at Randy, who didn’t notice.
“I design green spaces,” she continued. “Urban planning, landscape integration, sustainability. Actual sustainability, not just a couple of potted plants on a rooftop to make a corporation feel better about itself. It’s about balance—like making space for nature where people won’t just trample over it the second they want to build another parking lot. ”
Her hands moved as she spoke, shaping the air like she was drafting a blueprint in real time.
“I work with developers, which—believe me, I know—is frustrating, but it’s necessary.
If I don’t do it, someone else will, and they won’t care about how their plans disrupt the watershed or drive out pollinators or cut people off from natural spaces entirely.
And it matters, you know? It matters. Because if people don’t see nature—if they don’t touch it or even feel its presence in their lives—they stop thinking about it as something worth preserving.
It becomes an abstraction instead of a reality. ”
She paused, breath hitching, then pressed on.
“I’m not blind to what I’m up against. I know I’m actually working with the same people responsible for tearing things down.
And I know that sometimes, even when I fight, I still lose.
I still watch something beautiful get paved over.
But if I don’t fight at all, then there’s nothing left.
So yeah, I took that call. I answered that text.
I put out the fire my boss was setting…because I give a damn. ”
Her breath came sharp at the end as her shoulders rose and fell with the force of her own convictions.
The fire popped. Somewhere behind us, Randy’s voice carried on.
I had not interrupted her.
I would not.
I only watched, listening to the weight of her words, the shape of her passion, and the way she held the world in her hands and tried to make it better.
And I was pleased.
There was a fire in this woman. I’d felt it in the way she moved beneath me and took without hesitation, and in the way she let herself go without realizing she was capable of it.
Most mortals drifted through life unaware of what they could actually feel. But not her.
She felt everything. Even if she tried to pretend she didn’t.
That was what made her different.
And that was why tarrying further with her would be cruel.
The fire flared, casting long shadows across the clearing.
I turned.
Randy stood with arms raised, shaking a bundle of leaves over the flames, his voice climbing to match their crackling heat.
“The Green Man hears us!”
I sighed.
When I turned back to Samantha, she was still watching me—not the ritual, and not the show Randy was making of himself. I almost wished she were watching him instead. Or maybe that she’d managed to stay lost in her modern world altogether.
It would have been easier for her.
She would go back to her city, her work, her endless losing fight. She would build and love and grow—and one day, she would forget my name. Or maybe, someday, when the right kind of heat curled through her, she’d fondly recall some tall stranger who’d set it burning.
I would be long gone by then. The season would shift, as it always did, and I would follow.
Spring’s call stretched far beyond this place.
I could already feel it pulling at me as it whispered of lands waking from winter’s grip—of rivers swelling far away, of the first blooms bursting across distant valleys, of wild hills everywhere untouched by roads or walls or men who thought themselves masters of the land.
A rustling movement pulled me back to the present. The man called Randy, ever undeterred, was digging through a satchel at his feet. He pulled out a worn, leather-bound book. Its pages were brittle with age, and its spine cracked as he forced it open.
“I found something in the university archives,” Randy declared as he puffed up with importance. “An original source. No watered-down translation. The real deal.”
He cleared his throat and held the book aloft, as if the weight of it alone would lend him authority.
“Oh, come on,” someone groaned. “Give it a rest, man. Bet you can’t even pronounce half those words.”
Laughter rippled through the gathering, but Randy was undeterred.
He planted his feet, squared his shoulders, and began to read.
The moment the first word left his mouth, I stiffened.
This was no modern language. It was older than the stones beneath our feet, and the forests that had risen and fallen across this land. It was the language I’d used with the doe. A tongue once spoken only by those who knew the weight of what they were calling.
But Randy did not know.
Clueless laughter rippled through the group. But it was no laughing matter.
The rhythm was off, the syllables misplaced, the cadence clumsy where it should have been fluid, changing the meaning entirely.
And then, too late, I realized the gravity of the man’s mistake.
The words were no longer an invocation.
They were a binding.
The ground didn’t tremble and the air didn’t shift. But as the echo of the ancient spell faded, I knew deep in my being…something had changed.
I reached for my connection with the earth, but she gave no reply.
I had never known what it felt like not to belong to the land beneath me. Was this why mortals were so easily led astray? I stepped forward, searching for the deep, familiar pull, but the earth gave me nothing. I knelt, pressing my palm to the dirt, listening, waiting, but the silence stretched on.
“Faelan?” Samantha’s voice felt distant. “Are you okay?”
The connection wasn’t just dim—it was gone.
And for the first time in my long memory, I felt the slow creep of fear.