After some delicious dessert (it had raisins and honey and probably a high enough carbohydrate count to send people at nearby tables into a stupor: I shared it with Doloise) I waved at her rolled-up schematic.

“What are you planning, or is it a surprise?” I asked, trying to sound far more nonchalant than the panic the idea occasionally put into me.

She blinked at me slowly for a few minutes, which, I have to say, did not bring my heartrate down any.

“I meant on the blueprint paper,” I referenced with a finger to what she had left rolled-up and standing next to her on the booth’s bench.

“It is a declaration of independence.”

It was my turn to blink.

She went on eating, covering some of her portion with heavy cream.  I decided that calories didn’t count in fairyland.

“You know what I am,” she said.

“In theory,” I hedged.

“I am not a single leaf, nor even a branch, but the tree itself.”

I tried following her analogy, if that’s what it was.  Could have been a metaphor.  I was still hazy on all of that, heck, it might have been an allegory, but really, that’s for every man to decide for himself.  

I wasn’t very good with that, because my mind kept slipping back to the idea of how to do correspondence between animal life and plant life.  Were leaves like hair, and the forests were nests made of their own pieces?  No, because hair is a dead thing.  Leaves are alive, they have function.  Limbs and branches made even less sense, even if they were sometimes used as synonyms.  (I know what synonyms are, thankyouverymuch.)   After all, a tree could regrow and thin sticks were less like arms.  Maybe leaves were like thousands of tiny fingers.  Or cilia, not that I was sure we had cilia.  I was pretty sure we didn’t have flagella. 

And roots?  Were they like earth-tongues, licking delicately at nutrients and searching for water like some kind of mole beneath the surface?  But without tastebuds?  Maybe leaves were tastebuds?  Drinking in sunlight.  I wondered what sunlight tasted like.  “Light,” probably – far fewer calories than in normal…um.  Where was I going with this again?

Doloise continued after I didn’t respond.

“I believe that there is the possibility that there are viable seeds from this tree.”

I opened my mouth without particular concern for my future and asked, “What kind of tree?  I mean, is there a period of dormancy?  Do you have to hold the seed in water and a little bit of charcoal like an avocado tree?”

“You do not take me with all due concern.”

“Seriously?”

Heh.

She didn’t respond.  In fact, she put her fork down onto the plate and continued to stare at me from behind her dark shades.

“Fine, fine.  You want independent existence.  How is that even possible?”

“All good creations have independence,” she said.  “A child is just the creation of the material and ephemeral of the parents.  Why would I be any different?”

“I don’t honestly know,” I said.  I pulled out a raisin and chewed on it for a moment, thinking.  “Everything that I do know is speculative, but it seems to me that you’re an active construct, meaning it continues to take power to keep you together, and that without the full interest and effort of those who formed you, you will dissipate.”

“This dissipate – will it hurt?” she asked.

“Well.”  I stopped.  “Realms can be made of places, too.  And they don’t go away or have volition, right?  But they have a link – they have limits to where they can go, and what they can be like, and they still cost some kind of  energy.  So maybe there’s a way to do some kind of exchange of rules.  I don’t think it would hurt, though.  You would just lack purpose until you faded away, maybe?  Or maybe it would be instantaneous, like you were unsummoned.”

She dropped her head for a moment.  “You are not made of comfort.”

I didn’t laugh.  I was going to, but I didn’t.

“I had thought perhaps you could close the connection between myself and my Family.”

I dropped my fork.  I took a moment of time to find it out from underneath the table and set it aside.  I think she was serious.