Competition: Slice of Life 13: Trees

The trees stretched for as far as the sentient eye could see as Tyga made his way through the forest to a particular spot, branches and bracken crunching underfoot. It still had to be here, it just had to - it could not have simply just vanished overnight after years and years of being here, could it? If so, obviously the person who had been hired to cut it down was cold inside and they had no conscience.

“Come on now, where are you?” he said to himself as he paid close attention to each and every tree within view, trying to discern the minute differences between each one within this particular stand.

Running his hands over each trunk, he tried to see if the old symbols had been carved into them, no such luck. He pushed deeper into the forest now, the sun still protuding from above the canopy. His hands ran over a nondescript trunk and his fingers came across a particular symbol carved deep into the bark - he was getting warmer, so Tya picked up his pace and kept an eye out for other symbols.

One by one, they appeared and he finally was on the right track. The final symbol he remembered appeared up ahead on an old, towering oak tree and Tyga knew that this was the spot. He began his search of the nearby trees and finally came upon what he had been searching for - a large hollowed out oak tree near a small pile of rocks, big enough to fit several people inside its cavernous hollow - and it had remained untouched and just as he had left it before he was taken in by the Jedi Order.

As soon as Tyga saw this particular oak tree, the memories came flooding back of his childhood, as he played in and around this oak while a child, camping out here and creating a base to use against the Sith on imaginary attacks against their patrols who were on the lookout for him. A smile came across his lips as he remembered the happy times, but then those much darker memories appeared at the forefront of his mind and flashes of that night they came looking, just after he had been taken in by the Jedi. The pirates ransacked the estates, and spent hours combing the forest trying to find the Twi’lek youngling for whomever paid for their services. They were all defeated by his relations, but the happiness of those carefree days as a child had all been tainted by the violent actions of others.

Crawling inside the cavernous opening, Tyga sat with his back up against the trunk and looked out at the forest, remembering all of the times he had spent here as a youngling. He hoped that the tree would stay here for one thousand more years, so his future nieces, nephews and cousins could play under its strong branches and explore its cavern, camp out underneath the stars and also use it for whatever their imaginations could conjure. Resting his head up against the trunk, Tyga picked up a branch that had fallen in the last storm and he moved it around like a lightsaber, evening making the humming. Outside, the sun shone down and birds sang high up above, the forest teeming with life.