Sylva pressed her staff to the oldest root in her grove and waited for the spirit to answer. Nothing came. The staff, carved from a dead oak, had guided her for thirty years. Now it lay cold in her hands. She had spent those years taming every creature that wandered under her trees, feeding them, keeping them close, storing their warmth against this one task: waking the ancient forest spirit that slept beneath her roots. But the staff needed old forest power to reach that far down. Without it, she could not even tell if the spirit still breathed. She knelt in the grove and dug. Her fingers found bark, beetles, then something hard. She pulled a crown from the dirt. Leaves and twisting vines wove through its wood, and small buds glowed faintly along its rim. She had never seen it before. When she lifted it, a low hum passed into her wrists, the same note her staff once made. The crown held power, but too little. It flickered like a dying coal. Sylva needed more to fill her staff. She remembered the shrine at the grove's edge, its stone face wrapped in living roots. A relic rested in its hollow, a small light that had burned there longer than her grove had stood. She carried the crown to the shrine and set it in the hollow beside the old light. The two flared together. Green fire climbed the roots and spread across the stone runes. Sylva reached for the burning relic, but the heat drove her hand back. She could not hold it long enough to feed her staff. A cloak hung on a branch nearby, its cloth worn thin, its folds bound in living ivy. She had kept it for years without knowing why. Now she pulled it over her shoulders. The vines tightened against her skin and drank the light from the shrine. Warmth poured through the cloth into her chest. She gripped the burning relic through the ivy sleeve and pressed it to her staff. The dead oak drank. Its grain flushed green, then gold. The hum returned, louder than before, and ran down her arm like cold water. Across the grove, daisies opened all at once in white and purple bursts. A satyr with white-spotted brown fur stepped from the trees and lowered its head, tame as all the rest. Sylva drove the staff into the root and listened. Deep below, something shifted. A slow pulse answered her, then another, like a heart remembering how to beat. The spirit stirred. It was alive. But the pulse did not fade back into sleep. It grew stronger, and the ground trembled under her knees. The crown's buds burned out, spent. She had woken something she could no longer quiet, and she had no power left to hold it.