There are no animals in this forest.
I am the tallest one here. My toes dig through the loam, splitting and reaching round rocks to grip the soil. My legs, pressed together, push me into the sky. My skin is rough and gnarled, corrugated. My many arms bend at many elbows and send a multitude of fingers reaching, spreading in all directions, to expose me to the sun. I watch over the people in my kingdom the forest, even as I deny them their contact with our shared God.
The grass people spend brief lives feeding on the fallen carcasses of my kind. Short and weak, god cannot visit them for long, and they will die. They are uneaten food, for there are no animals in this forest.
Liana people climb my body and stretch across my arms. Bryophyte people take root in my armpits and elbows, catching rain in their mouths and holding it there; precious water in which microbes swim. Mushroom people crouch in my shadow and eat my waste.
Tree people, slow developers, jostle in slow motion for the right to stand close to me, to be in the places that will be made clear when I fall. They wish to sink their spreading toes into my rotting corpse, and eat my wisdom as they shoot for the sky. They all want to be the tallest one here, and to interpret the word of God for those below.
Nothing will chop me to the ground and build shelters with my bones. Nothing will incinerate my flesh for heat or for cookery. Nothing will stab into my heart and drink my blood, for there are no animals in this forest.
And when the flames come, when it rains fire and the ground splits open to expose seven layers of magma, when molten rock is thrown at the earth, when God spits fire to envelope His creation, when black clouds cover the sun for millenia and everything darkens and droops and wilts and dries and burns? What then?
What of it? This is not now. We live for the now. We are alive now and we will learn from our mistakes. We live, intertwined in vicious competition amongst ourselves, but this cannot be seen, as our battles are but a snapshot in time. We are motionless with our fingertips embedded in our children's throats, and a scene more peaceful cannot be imagined.