Jules almost didn't care about the bones the more he stared at them. Of course people had died here, people had died everywhere. Nothing registered in his mind as off, almost like a sticky honey had blotted out his fight or flight mode. The tree was too beautiful to leave. The leaves were so beautiful, that dark hue of green, he never thought he had seen a more vivid shade of any color in his life, almost as if the color itself were alive.
Jules knew he had to sit down at the base of the tree and just enjoy being against it. He had seen seldom living things he had liked in his sixteen years of miserable existence, and of all of them paled in comparison to his feeling of ecstasy as he relaxed against it.
It felt as if the world melted off of his shoulders. Nothing mattered, there was nothing he could do. He accepted that freely now. It had been harder before. Life went on as it had, or it didn't for some, while others, such as the tree, grew in the devastation and had purpose, that defied the prickly law of nature. There was no possible way the tree could be here. There hadn't been any trees in close to fifteen years now, when he was only a baby. The fact that it stood here meant something. Something cosmically deep. Jules couldn't seem to think too much harder on it before that, too slipped away.
When he awoke the roots had already begun to twine around his feet.
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