Memories of a Tree: Supernatural Reincarnations

...

Persephone is a tree spirit who has lived for many so years and grown so ancient and so powerful that she has developed human form. Though she prefers being a tree, there are advantages of being human. The people, for one, are very interesting to interact with. She enjoys a quiet life in her tree until she was suddenly attacked and her tree burned.

With her original form destroyed, Persephone dies.

Years later, she wakes in the body of one of the wives of a bloodthirsty king. She spends a few weeks dealing with harem intrigues, sullen maids, and her husband utterly ignoring her before deciding that she would rather go on her own adventure. Surely no one will care if she forgets about being married and becomes a travelling magical mercenary, right?

After all, there's no reason for King Lucifer to abandon his castle, leave all his beautiful wives behind, and go after her.

She is about to find out just how wrong she is.

...

Prologue

Persephone was careful not to interact too much with the humans that had made their home around her tree. She looked human enough to the naked eye, but anyone with enough skill and life experience would be able to tell that she was anything but.

She was a minor tree spirit, minor being the operative term. The only thing she had power over was her tree and the fruits that it bore and while she had magic, it was also limited to the tree and some parts of nature. Plants, for example, would flourish under her attention and fruits could grow out of their seasons if she so wished it, but she had to be careful not to show either of those skills in fear of being labelled a witch and thrown into the ocean. She didn't know if she could drown, being a tree and all, but she would probably get all waterlogged and sink. 

While her life was pleasant enough, it was also frightening because she had seen what the humans were capable of and how far they were willing to go to get what they needed. No, that wasn't quite true either, was it? Because it wasn't just about what the humans needed. They could have obtained everything they needed and still craved more. It was about want. They wanted so many things that it was frightening. 

Persephone couldn't understand ever wanting so many things. The only thing she ever needed was sunlight and enough water to keep growing and the only thing she wanted was to be left alone. 

A human living inside of her tree was, apparently, unacceptable, however, so she had to build a house. She built a little house with wooden planks that she fell from the forest and brought them all together with magic and sheer willpower. Apparently, humans used nails for that sort of thing, but by the time she figured out what the humans used to build their houses and that she was supposed to build the house by the tree and not around it, it was too late and her house had already been partially completed. 

There was a young boy who would drop buy occasionally and help with the construction of the house, but she never did catch his name, though he seemed rather unimportant. Perhaps he was merely curious, or perhaps he was someone she had helped in the past. 

Unfortunately, her house drew attention. People were not used to seeing an entire house that was built around a tree, much less a house that looked like it was an extension of one, like the branches had woven into the planks and incorporated it into itself. 

Thankfully, she had been living in the area for so long that even the ancestors of the children who now lived around her knew her and her only crime was that she was slow to adapt to the times. 

They didn't know what she was, but had accepted that she wasn't a witch, since witches wouldn't take so long building something as simple as a house. 

She didn't think she was slow. Sure, a few seasons had passed before she completed her house, but she didn't think there was time limit. She had just been taking her time because she wanted to pick out the best timber for her house and they had to smell right. She also wasn't going around cutting down random trees! Some of those tress were her friends! She avoided the trees that looked like they were reaching sentience and focused on the ones that were at the ends of their lifespan. 

And cutting down trees was hard work! She didn't know how the humans managed to cut down so many and build so many houses so quickly! Eventually, the boy who visited her often managed to figure out how to use cement and make bricks, which allowed her to get through building the rest of the house much quicker! 

Once her house was built, she began to get visitors. She got visitors while she was building the house as well, but mostly curious passersby who would side-eye her and then ignore her shortly after she let them know what she was doing. 

She knew that some of them thought she wouldn't ever be able to finish building her house at all and she took great pride in proving them wrong even though the house tilted to one side precariously from the wooden planks that were misshapen and was mostly held together because she had her tree limbs curl around the planks and the other side was a mess of bricks and dried clay slapped together. She had veins crawl up over her entire house, roses covering the walls that acted as both insulation and coverage to the mess that she had made. 

The thing was, she had to build a house because she couldn't stay in the tree without garnering odd glances, but now that she had the house, people kept coming by to say hi to her, which wasn't too bad, she supposed. The villagers shared stories with her and seemed to enjoy her fruits. She traded with them sometimes, her peaches and well wishes for things that she placed around her house. 

Eventually, the village turned into a town and time changed enough that she needed a permit to stay... exactly where she had been staying for the past few hundred years. She needed a name too. 

She chose the first name she saw in the book on the way to the Office of Registrations. Persephone was apparently the greek goddess of agriculture and vegetation, which she thought was apt for her. 

The man behind the counter had not been impressed by her lack of papers, but the lack of papers and registrations for people who didn't live in big cities was normal enough that he was not too suspicious. 

They didn't much care about her claim to her tree but more on the validity of her claim to the land that her tree was sitting on. 

It took a while, but once all the paperwork were completed, she could finally rest in peace. 

Or so she thought. 

The thing was, she made a mistake with her tree. 

It was a fruit tree that bore peaches, sweet delectable peaches with flowers the bloomed every season and made the whole town smelled like peach. It was something of a town attraction and the locals introduced her as a botanist who cared for the tree. 

The tree itself was impressive, but what impressed the people more was the fact that the fruits that her tree bore had magical powers. That part was entirely accidental. 

It began with a little boy who had stumbled towards her one day, starved and thirsty. No one else seemed to be paying attention to the boy, who looked skin and bones. She looked around and decided it was no hardship to part with one of her fruits, so she gave the boy a peach fruit and imbued it with some magic so that the boy may be able to withstand the cold winter that was coming. 

The boy was, apparently, also suffering from a disease that should have killed him, but her fruit had healed him.

There were others after that, men and women who ate her fruits and found themselves no longer suffering from ailments that had troubled them. Before long, news of the magical peach tree started to spread and people began flocking towards her tree, demanding miracles that she wasn't capable of granting. 

Unwilling to deal with this, she decided to go into a long hibernation, hiding among the pillows that someone must have gifted her at some point and falling into a deep sleep. 

She slept fitfully, her dreams filled with nightmares and cold and heat in equal intensity and when she woke, it was to the sight of her tree that had been stripped bare, every fruit and leaf plucked, the branches cut and broken. Half of her house was on fire and the other half had been completely destroyed. 

She struggled to wake, but someone had poisoned her tree and had poisoned her. 

Dark magic must have used to keep her under while they destroyed her tree. 

Wha- why are you doing this? she cried out weakly, feeling like a part of her had been torn out. 

How selfish of you to keep this all to yourself, said a voice of the one who had come for her. 

Persephone turned her head towards the woman, who looked entirely too calm given the raging inferno that was once her home. She was a beautiful young woman with crimson eyes and flaming red hair. She wore entirely too little clothes for the harsh winter that they were experiencing, but she supposed witches who started fires didn't need clothes to stay warm. 

A magical tree such as this one should be shared with everyone, she continued. Don't you worry. The seeds will be carefully cultivated and the branches propagated." She turned towards the burning house and Persephone struggled to get up so she could put out the fire that was burning- burning.

Hands gripped her by the arms and pulled her back. 

Do you have a death wish? demanded the woman. Apparently, burning down a tree was fine, but she wasn't willing to go so far as to commit murder. She twisted in the woman's grip and kept going, the pull of her tree to her strong enough to pull the man with her. 

Persephone! cried out one of the villagers, who had appeared out of nowhere. Another reached for her arm, pulling her back. 

No, she cried out weakly, hands reaching towards the open flame, trying her best to quell it with magic. The tips of her fingers were blackened. Was it the fire or the poison that would take her first? 

You can't- the man holding her started to say, but his words faltered when he saw what was happening. 

It was too late. 

In front her eyes, her blackened fingers began to crumble, turning to dust right before their eyes. 

What in the world- the woman began to say, but if she had anything useful to say after that, Persephone could no longer hear her. 

Persephone was the tree and the tree was burning. 

Without her, there would be no fruits, magical or otherwise. 

She screamed as she burned and burned and crumbled to dust.

Chapter One

Persephone felt like she was drifting in the abyss, a cloud of whispered promises drifting in her ears.

She didn't know what was happening to her, though it was... she supposed it was not unpleasant. She was a cloud in the sky, a fleck of sand on a beach that was brought into the vast ocean to drift back into the endless darkness beyond. Things happened around her, but she was so small that it didn't matter. 

She slept and woke and slept again, an endless cycle that brought moments of wakefulness that gave her glimpses of different places and unfamiliar faces. 

All that magic and nowhere to go, a little tree spirit with it's fruits that had been spread out all over the kingdom, her branches propagated and little bits of her planted all around. 

She was everywhere and nowhere. 

Persephone had never had bits of her growing in so many different places before. She didn't know it was something that could be done. 

There were small pieces of her everywhere, but none of the trees were strong enough to sustain all of her. 

Perhaps that was why, in the end of the day, she had come back to life the way she had. 

In the grand scheme of things, if Persephone could have picked any life to reincarnate into, she wasn't sure what she would have gone with. She hadn't really thought much of it either. 

She had stared off as a tree that had gained sentience over years of growing and soaking up knowledge around her, and then eventually managed to obtain a human body. 

Her life had been peaceful. She enjoyed the changing seasons, blooming flowers in