"Descend, beast. I have climbed the eucalyptus spine of the world to demand your name," I shouted into the canopy, branches tearing at my resolve. The wind was still. The leaves whispered. Then he blinked — slow, deliberate. His eyes were galaxies trapped in fur. "I was old when your kind still dreamt of fire," He murmured. "You cannot bear the weight of my name." "Try me," I said, drawing the blade carved from the bone of the First Dropbear. He yawned. "You are made of hunger," he said, "and I am the forest that does not feed." He stretched, ancient joints creaking like glaciers shifting beneath soil. Bark split open on trees all around us, revealing pulsing veins of silver sap. "You carry a blade," he said, "but not the silence to wield it." I stepped forward. The forest recoiled, branches drawing back like breath held too long. "Name yourself," I demanded, though my voice faltered beneath the weight of his gaze. "Let the heavens hear it and tremble." He tilted his head. A single leaf spiraled down between us, slow as a falling verdict. "I am the god who sleeps with one eye open," he said, "and dreams in tongues your soul cannot hold." I raised the blade. It hummed with old fury, bone remembering blood. "Then teach me the language of gods." He laughed — a low, creaking sound, like a tree breaking under the moon’s gaze. "Very well," Koalandir whispered, stepping closer, voice now inside my head, behind my thoughts. "But know this: once spoken, a god’s name cannot be forgotten. It will rot inside you. It will root." The eucalyptus groaned. The sky split — not with thunder, but with something softer. More final. He leaned in. And he began to spell it. The sound wasn’t a sound. It was the memory of thunder before lightning. It was the crack of seedpods splitting open in a firestorm. The vowels tasted of sap and ash. The consonants bled into my teeth. Each syllable dug into my skull like roots into loam. I dropped the blade. He did not blink. "You asked for the name," he said, "not the meaning." My knees buckled. The forest shifted. The leaves no longer whispered—they chanted, quietly, in the same rhythm as my heartbeat. A rhythm not mine anymore. "What—" I tried to say. My mouth did not cooperate. "You are soil now," he said gently. "You will bear my fruit." The ground swallowed my feet. Bark bloomed along my arms. I felt the photosynthesis begin — slow, hungry, eternal. "Your hunger brought you here," Koalandir said, curling back into the canopy, his outline vanishing in dappled green and shadow. "Now be still. Grow. Watch." I screamed, but it came out in leaves.

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