Part One: The Tree

He stood in the middle of the forest. Well, generally speaking it was the middle. The borders of the forest traced a decidedly irregular shape, so geometrically (or would that be geographically?) speaking it would be near impossible to define the exact middle (or centre) of the forest without resorting to some nasty calculus and making some assumptions regarding the shape of the forest... but I digress... what I mean is that he was nowhere near any of the borders of the forest, of which technically there is only one, which encompasses the forest in an irregular shape as previously mentioned, but I thought I'd remind you anyway. He was The Tree. Not the Tree, with 'the' beginning with a lowercase 't,' but The Tree, with an upper case 'T' beginning the word 'The' (and the word 'Tree' for that matter). Kind of like how we call really cool people in our society, 'The Man," or, "The Woman (Okay that one's a bit awkward sounding... not that women can't be cool)." Yes he was The Tree (in case you missed its mention the first couple times, or for that matter didn't read the title); tall and powerful, he stood above the surrounding trees... and bushes, though I'm sure that's obvious to most people's immaginations (though the alternative might make for some pretty cool visuals... but I shant go there).

His (or her... but I won't get into discussions of tree sexuality here) roots stretched deep into the earth, penetrating the soft soil, clawing their way around the roots of the surrounding flora, and squeezed through the crevaces in the bedrock before anchoring themselves to said bedrock. Near his base-- which might cleverly be refered to as his butt in a bit of low-brow, messed up, metaphoric analogy funny making, but I'm not going to go there, oh wait I just did-- his immense trunk, with its thick knobly bark, made for a nice photo spot for someone wishing to show of the massiveness of the trunk by having herself attempt to hug the tree by unsuccessfulling wrapping her arms around it; it tappered gradually upward towards a blunted point at his peak, hundreds of feet above the forest floor. His boughs, some long and twisted, other short and the opposite of twisted, some medium length and somewhere in between twisted and not twisted in which it really comes down to a matter of personal judgment as to the degree of twistyness to define them as twisted or not, and others falling into some other category defining their dimensions and orientations jutted out from his trunk in all directions except one; given that his trunk could more or less be described as having a circular cross-section, there are in effect, an infinite number of directions from which his boughs could jutt out in, and thus it follows that there must be at least one direction in which the boughs do not jutt out since they can only jutt out in a finite number of directions.

Yes, he was a formidible tree. He looked just like all the other trees, and in fact was just like them in every way with regards to function and internal chemical processes. Yet, he was taller, bigger and wiser (metaphorically speaking, or so one might use that as a way to stereotype his prodigious grandeur) than all the other trees, and so was better than them for it. He was master of the forest-- watchtree and protector. If it were not for his presense, those nasty humans, with their blunt teeth, scrawny arms and manicured fingernails would have long ago invaded the forest and stripped it of its natural and percieved supernatural beauty to put up another shopping mall or some other waste of space and money. But thanks to his massive size, and some arbitrary human law derived from our own vanity that size does matter and thus we must protect things that are really big because they're somehow "special," the men were kept at bay, and so both himself and the surrounding forest were protected, not that he needed the other trees around; though they did make for nice, if slightly anemic, company.

Nothing could ruin him, destroy him, bring him down. He snickered as the wind rustled his needles (did I forget to mention, he's a coniferous tree), in its feeble attempt to blow him over. He was imovable, impenetrable, and immobile. He was the greatest tree in all the forest; he knew it, and all others did as well.