The seasons changed. Her disgust and fear became murky anger and sad wistfulness for the life she had once loved, and for the people she had once loved.

As torpid years passed, her loneliness slowly dawned on her. Her once-friends would visit and play beneath her boughs, and that was a small comfort. Almost before her knowledge of their nearness could crystallize in her slow sap, they were gone again. For Daphne, they grew old and blew away as quickly as the seed-wisps of the autumn flowers.

Before she had become a tree, she had walked through forest alone, but was not lonely in the company of so many trees. She had once pretended then that, because she loved the trees, they loved her back.

Now, her rumination no longer driven by hot blood, she came to understand that the trees around her were the only living beings that existed in her timeframe. And that these cold unfeeling trees could never return her love.