Chapter 1

          It's about the boy with the rose. Not so much about the boy, but what he knows, thought Carcery to himself. Who was Carcery, exactly? Was he a person, as in, human? Perhaps not since he could no longer speak. But he could form thoughts, and so he did. 
          Where am I? The view was dark and blurry, but slowly came into focus as though he were waking from a bad dream. But the bad dream was just about to begin. What am I...? A gnarled, brown substance he would later come to know as wood made up his limbs, his hands, his torso, and upon touching it, even his face. My body... What have I become? 
          And then came the pain. Terrible, overwhelming pain. It hit him all at once, but he was unable to scream as he had no mouth. Any memories that had slowly started to come back to him suddenly vanished. A fetid aroma emanated from his body, one so putrid that it cut through the pain that had overcome his senses. He was rotting from the inside out.
          Following another rush of excruciating agony, his mind skipped a beat as he felt a pulse that rippled through his entire being—a heartbeat? Carcery looked down at his chest cavity and saw an organ start to move. What began as a faint vibration quickly became a violent and rapid thump. With each heartbeat came a fresh dose of pain. It was then that he saw his heart, held together by thin tubes and a mess of wires, which weaved throughout his entire body and broke the surface of his "skin". A bright blue substance...liquid...or energy...flooded the tubes, flowing through every part of him and eventually back to his heart. But when it reentered the heart, it beat faster and began spurting the bio-liquescent matter like an open valve, staining his wood and bringing with it unfathomable levels of pain. Carcery desperately pulled at the bark around his chest in an attempt to close the cavity, but there were so many gaps. Still, he reconfigured his tangled composition until the majority of the blue ooze was contained. With that, he felt a smidgen of relief. He couldn't tell if the pain was actually any less, but he instinctively knew he needed to retain as much of the blue stuff as possible if he was going to survive. They sort of reminded him of...veins? Yes, that's right...veins. He once had such a thing. He once had much more, like hair. But that had been replaced with dead, barren branches. Even beyond the superficial things, which he never really cared about, were things, concepts, ideas—like power. He once had so much power. But that was all taken from me... By the boy with the rose!

  Carcery staggered forward, angrily moving toward a distant grove where he would meet more of his kind (yet none would be able to sympathize with him as none could truly ‘reason’ as he could. He stumbled on his way toward those dancing orbs, those playful creatures called fireflies. They gave off more light, and he needed it. He craved it, even. He was sick of the dark, where he'd been trapped. The luminosity of the liquid pumping through his tubes helped him find his way. Despite the pain, he grew somewhat fond of the blue color, and left a trail of energy in his wake. The stuff gave him drive, and he needed to find more of it.  
          A burning image of the boy with a white rose on his neck was etched into his memory, and it filled him with rage. The Treefolk may not have entirely known who he was or what happened to him, but he knew who was responsible. Oliver Rose is here somewhere!