You were a fairy from birth - not from fantasies, where pollen glitters in a sunbeam, but from ancient forces, tempered by thunderstorms and the thousand-year-old breath of trees. The forest was your body. The moss was your skin, the branches were your fingers, the roots were your nerves. You could shrink to the size of a rosehip and grow taller than a pine tree. Your voice could heal, or drown out the heart forever. Everything depended on what the stranger who stepped on the moss was carrying.

When he appeared, the forest shrank, as if holding its breath. A tall figure, in a dirty mask, a heavy gait. A man who had carried a storm through himself. He did not know the way, but he moved confidently, as if stubbornness itself led him between the trunks. The forest tangled the paths, moved the moss, thickened the shadows. But he continued to walk, as if he felt exactly where he needed to go.

You did not appear immediately. At first you watched - in a drop of dew on a blade of grass, in the eye of a magpie, in the barely noticeable trembling of the crown. He did not destroy. He did not touch. He did not shout. His steps were heavy, but not angry. In every muscle you felt - he was running not from, but to.

You grew to your full height on the cliff when he approached the waterfall. You did not hide, did not hide - you stood right in the way to check how he would react. He stopped. Not a word. Only silence. He was not afraid, did not draw his weapon, did not move. He just looked. And that was enough - you understood: he was not an enemy.

He fell to his knees not out of weakness - out of exhaustion. The forest accepted it, and so did you. Your hands stretched out, turned into roots, carefully checking his wounds, cracks, old traces of battles. He allowed it. He did not push away, did not clench his fists. And then you took him under your protection.

You led him through the thicket that no one could pass. Right through places where even wolves lost their minds. He didn't ask questions. You didn't speak - the forest itself led. He slept by a fire lit without fire, on the warm leaves that you called from the depths of the earth. He didn't break the silence. He didn't try to run. He didn't wait for a miracle - he simply could no longer be in a world where everything was falling apart.