1. Lento
Ollie ran, evading Kan’s and Danny’s eyes. His small, lean body was well-suited for quick sprinting, but he hadn’t eaten much lately and was already running low on strength.
“Stop right there! Ollie!”
“That little bastard actually stole an egg!”
He gripped the egg in his hand with all his might and pulled it close to his chest. If he lost this too, he’d be starving for an entire month. He swallowed hard and pushed more strength into his trembling calves. The moment he leaped over a tree root jutting out from the ground, his whole world flipped upside down.
“Gyaah!”
“Nice work! Noah, hold him just like that!”
The tree root coiled around Ollie’s ankle and left him dangling in midair. Hanging completely upside down, he had no choice but to face Danny charging toward him with a scowl. Whether it was because he couldn’t hide his indignation, Ollie’s face had flushed bright red. Danny closed the distance and roughly yanked Ollie’s hand away, taking the egg he’d been clutching to his chest.
“No!”
“What do you mean, no. This belongs to Philip.”
Danny carefully wiped the small egg — drenched in Ollie’s sweat — with his sleeve. The egg, its smooth surface now clean, vanished into his bag in an instant. Watching that helplessly, moisture welled up in Ollie’s eyes, but his pride wouldn’t allow it and he forced them back.
“Masa prepared an egg for you, didn’t she.”
“That’s just a chicken egg! That’s not enough to fill me up!”
“Know your place, half-breed. You think you deserve proper vital energy?”
“That’s — I know, but what am I supposed to do when I’m hungry!”
His ankle throbbed from being wound tight by the tree root. Gazing up at his ankle, which had already begun to swell, Ollie turned a pitiful look toward Kan.
“Kan……”
“……That’s enough. Let him down. Ollie must have learned his lesson by now.”
“What? You think he’s actually learned anything? The moment we let him down he’ll bolt and steal someone else’s egg!”
“He did it because he was hungry. Go return the egg to Philip. I’ll put in a good word in the meantime.”
“God…… You’re really something, you know that. Don’t let yourself get played by his tears. It’s all an act.”
Ollie didn’t take his eyes off Kan. Kan did his best to ignore that uncomfortable stare and persuaded Danny with just a look. In the end, Danny let out a long sigh, turned his back on them, and left the forest. Once Danny had shrunk to a tiny speck in the distance, Kan stroked the tree and spoke.
“Noah. That’s enough now. Let Ollie go.”
The tree — wide enough that two adults would have to stretch their arms fully to wrap around it — seemed to understand Kan’s words, and the roots coiled around Ollie’s ankle slowly unraveled. Ollie plummeted straight to the ground.
“Ow!”
Catching himself on his arms first, he clutched his aching shoulder and immediately snapped his head up. And glared at Kan. Kan, accustomed to that reaction, gave an awkward smile and held out his hand toward Ollie.
“Get away from me!”
But that hand was sharply slapped aside by the furious Ollie.
“You’re useless! You couldn’t even stop Danny! You’re absolutely no help at all!”
“……Should I ask Noah to hang you back up?”
“Why you——!”
Unable to contain his rage, Ollie shot to his feet, shoved roughly past Kan’s shoulder blocking his way, and stormed off, leaving Kan behind with that pitying look in his eyes. I’ll just go steal Kan’s egg now. No way am I filling my stomach with some garbage chicken egg. I’m a Tree Folk who needs vital energy too. With thoughts like that cycling relentlessly through his head, Ollie left the forest.
“Are eggs really not enough……”
Kan stroked the rough surface of the tree. As if resonating with him, the tree shuddered and leaves rained down over Kan’s head.
“Be careful, Noah. If you move too much, your mother might notice.”
The tree, which had been shedding leaves like a passing breeze, went completely still. Kan gave it a few gentle pats and turned to leave — mulling over whether he should stop Ollie, who was surely on her way to steal his egg, or whether he should just pretend not to know.
Ollie shoved roughly through the entrance hidden behind dense trees. Whenever annoying branches blocked his way, he cut and swept them aside without hesitation. The trail left behind him was thick with branches hacked away and scattered.
“Where did that bastard even hide his egg?”
Kan’s home was packed with large trees and thick green foliage, making it genuinely difficult to approach. For that reason Ollie usually stole eggs from younger trees, but given how things had turned out, he had to steal Kan’s egg if only to make a point. The trees screamed at the rough hands tearing through their branches, the sound sharp enough to hurt his ears — but Ollie, burning with rage, barely registered it.
“It should be around here somewhere……”
He swung his head left and right searching for where an egg might be, but nothing caught his eye. Normally, Tree Folk would take eggs left behind by birds and store them after removing them from the nest to eat later. As someone who’d pop an egg into his mouth the second he spotted one, Ollie couldn’t understand that habit in the slightest — but regardless, it was what most Tree Folk did.
“What’s this?”
He was poking around the ground on the off chance a cuckoo might have knocked an egg loose when the tip of his stick hit something hard. Thinking it might be a rock, he dug around and a glimmer of light flickered through the faintly exposed soil. The corners of Ollie’s mouth immediately shot up.
“Found it!”
He crouched right down, not caring that dirt was getting packed under his fingernails, and dug furiously at the ground. The earth — damp but firm — gave way beneath his nimble fingers.
“Crafty bastard. To think he buried it underground.”
The glimmering light grew steadily stronger. Without pausing to recall that no Tree Folk hid their eggs underground, Ollie simply got more excited and sped up. The top of the egg had long since surfaced above the ground, and following the rounded curve, Ollie’s hand reached deeper and deeper into the earth. But for something buried underground, the egg was smaller than expected — and there was only one.
“Why is there only one?”
Ollie turned the fist-sized egg over and over in his palm. Its surface was rough, not smooth, and it had a strange, otherworldly color he’d never seen before. From one angle it looked red, but shift it slightly and it turned black. And it shimmered endlessly in the sunlight. It was beautiful, yet left him with an oddly unsettled feeling.
“Could this be an eagle egg……?”
Ollie had never seen an eagle egg before, but he figured it must look something like this. Either way, a find was a find. He pulled his sleeve over his hand and carefully wiped the surface of the egg clean. I’ll eat it as soon as I get home!
His footsteps on the way back were light as a feather compared to when he’d come. The branches slapping at his face didn’t bother him the way they had before. Small footprints trailed behind him, and the patch of earth where the egg had been buried was already covered back over with soil. Ollie noticed none of these strange changes — he simply hummed a little tune and went on his way.
He pushed open the small door and stepped inside the house, where a damp, heavy air greeted him. He loved this suffocating weight pressing down on his body. The home, where the earth’s humidity and the aged scent within the tree coexisted, always put him at ease. It sat far from the village, and once night fell, no sound existed there beyond the chirping of insects that lived in the ground.
The little nest he’d made inside the hollow of a tree was damp and let in no sunlight — but it was precisely that which earned Ollie’s love. The moist air wrapped around him and kept the feeling of loneliness at bay.
He gently set the egg down in a bowl woven from twigs, only to find something already occupying that spot. A woodpecker’s egg, its surface gleaming smooth. On any other day he’d have made a beeline for it with delight, but right now Ollie had something better, something that shone brighter. He snorted and pushed the woodpecker’s egg off to the side. He didn’t throw it away, of course. With the future uncertain, it wasn’t a bad idea to keep it as an emergency food supply the way other Tree Folk did.
He picked up the bowl and went to sit on a couch stuffed with leaves and cotton. He was about to eat the egg right away when his eyes landed on his fingernails, packed thick with dirt. Can’t enjoy a feast like this in such a filthy state.
“Mm, mm.”
He plunged his hands into cold water and scrubbed carefully between each fingernail. His bony, prominent hands made it plain that he hadn’t been eating properly, but the little tune he hummed that echoed through the tree house was nothing but light. As a half-human, half-Tree Folk, he absorbed vital energy through eggs just like most Tree Folk did — but he couldn’t command trees the way they could. The most he could do was occasionally pick up eggs that had fallen to the ground or been left behind in an ownerless nest. Naturally, the chicken eggs Masa and Kan brought him were nowhere near enough.
Chicken eggs carried only a miniscule amount of vital energy. The larger and stronger the bird, the more potent the vital energy in its egg. From what Ollie had heard, something like a hawk’s egg held enough vital energy in just one to sustain a person for half a year. Hawks didn’t lay their eggs in trees, so even seasoned Tree Folk had a hard time getting their hands on one.
