She coils where the carved letters end, where the topmost branch forgets it was ever wood and remembers only sky. Below her, the trunk spirals with an alphabet that has arrived at the end of remembrance, wisdom cut by hands now soil, promises long bereaved. She does not read them. Her glow illuminates the dead’s unsalvageable truths.
Each night her breath moves down the bark like slow amber, and the runes shine briefly, one by one, as if the tree were remembering its own name in the dark. She eats the dark. Travelers see her light from far valleys and call it a star caught in branches. They are not wrong. Stars are only fires on lonesome journeys. And hers is the loneliest, traveling long through the endlessness that dreams us.
When the last rune cools, she tucks her head beneath one wing and sleeps, like us, in her burning.