She traced the rough lines in the bark, the ridges and dips, which were almost skin smooth. The tree branches seem to bend down towards her, waiting, the leaves humming. She hoped the ancestors would hear her prayer, even through her fingertips. Their souls were said to be in the sap of the trees, flowing into the leaf veins and into the earth. They were said to still give life and thereby still lived in another form. But could even they hear the fear in her fingertips? How could they, blind sap of the trees, rise and help? She needed an army of resurrected warriors, not syrup or nuts or shade, or anything a tree could give.
She pressed her palm firmly against the tree trunk. It extended barely past the span of her thumb and pinky. It was lithe, smooth, tall, and slender. Some thought the ancient trees to be giants, but these trees stood for a thousand years, rarely got thicker or taller than this one. No weeds grew underneath it for the root network was so thick. The bark came in various colors, sometimes bright green tinged with yellow, or orange shaded with dark gray, and rarely red. But strangely the leaves were always green, except after harvest they turned dun-colored and withered. In planting time, they bloomed to bright white so it looked like the snow which fell in the mountains. The trees were said to be as hard as granite so no saw could cut them. But her people honored the trees and then never tried to cut them so no one knew if this was true.
Then last year, the trees had begun to bleed. When the blooms had not come, the village knew something ailed the trees. By the fall, the once valley-long grove had withered. As the trees died, their dark red sap tainted the river pink. The tree she now touched was the only one left alive. After the trees had not bloomed, the strangers had come and so had their diseases.
At first, her people had welcomed the strangers, desperate as her people were to trade for food, since the trees had failed them. But then her people had started dying like the trees. The disease burst out of the mouth of its victims, bloody sores and raw throats, spreading out of the mouth and down the body. In the end, the victims died screaming with raw skin and open, oozing sores.