Imogen Rocchiccioli took second place in the years 7/8/9 story category of the Wangaratta Young Writers Award with this piece.

The competition is run annually by the Rotary Club of Appin Park Wangaratta and the Rotary Club of Wangaratta, and is supported by the Wangaratta Library.

A dull whirring sound echoes through the forest. It shakes the leaves of the ancient pine trees, rattling them down to the very tips of their roots. Wood chips scatter on the swirling breeze. It stops abruptly, the seconds of silence deepening, worse than the senseless drone of the machines. The trees take a breath, their voices beginning to murmur once more, but this time with worry, fear making their branches quiver, clacking against each other in a solemn beat.

And the first of them falls.

She senses the solid thud as the trunk slams into the rocks and dewy grass below, the branches snapping as they collide with lower foliage. Her heart misses a beat, pulling tight like the string of a guitar and snapping back into place. And she hears the tree screaming. Her wings spread, unfurling like the growth of a flower from her back, and she launches into the air.

A thick mist obscures most of her airborne view, coating the deep green depths with hazy white. But she does not hesitate to dive in.

Birds spill from the forest, thousands of black silhouettes darting away from the treetops. She perches on a branch and waits, watches them leave. Danger is coming. She whispers to herself. The birds always know.

There is no time to wait.

Branches whip her arms as she plummets down to the undergrowth, snagging on her clothes and hair. She ignores their grasping fingers and continues falling, eyes searching for the source of intrusion in the gloom. The sunlight slowly fades away, unable to penetrate the leafy green. She halts suddenly, wings flared in horror, because there, sprawled lifelessly on the ground, is the fallen tree. She sees the people crowding around it, cutting, slicing, its limbs away.

As they turn to their next victim, the wind picks up, swirling and dancing around them, howling mournfully, haunting them and chilling them to their thin bones. They look up and see her, hovering, her long, dark hair flailing around her face like a nest of snakes, and halt.

She laughs. They don’t know what she is, and it fills her with an immense power, the knowledge that she could control them, hurt them, and all in the meagre blink of their bright, bright eyes. She can see it now, the slender vines twisting up from their starched-white bones, moss coating their broken bodies and dragging them deep into the earth. Yet she shakes the intrusive thought away, and smiles at them. They flinch, as if they expect her to dive upon them, as if she will blast them and all their colourful machinery into oblivion.

She could, of course.

Her heart hardens as she watches the quivering mass before her, and feels the control she has over her power weaken. Harpies aren’t supposed to be forgiving, after all.

It was only one piece of their ghastly machines, one out of thousands. And it was only once. But humans are so precious, and their weak minds can’t comprehend such happenings. They have categorised her as an Unnatural Phenomena, and she doesn’t like being one. Trust them to try to make her fit into their pointless, short lives.

The people come and go, looking for her. Their large, black cameras click and snap, trying to capture evidence that doesn’t exist. Evidence that she is real. Pointless. She watches them, never showing her face. They will forget about her in time, she knows. But when they do leave, the machines will come back. There isn’t much time left to save the forest before it is gone forever.

She talks to the trees. The leaves whisper her secrets, their breathy voices calm in her ears. They tell her to leave, to stay, to run, to do nothing because it was always going to happen. That’s the problem with plants. They can never agree on the same thing. I’ll save you. That’s what she wants to tell them, to reassure them with, but she doesn’t know how.

The people come back again. Their engines whirr and rumble through the day, and into the night. She watches through gaps in the leaves, always still, always silent. Bit by bit, the forest shrinks, backing away from the growing city. In time it will disappear, and she will too, with it, she realises. There isn’t much time left to save the forest before it is gone forever. Gone forever? Why not? That’s what they want anyway. It will. Overnight.

And it is as she witnesses the rapid decline of her pine. “Come,” she whispers. “Follow. We’re moving.” The forest calls back to her, follow, follow, follow, echoing, their quiet voices reverberating through the trees. The wind listens to their words, scoops their voices up and sprinkles them over the desolate earth, singing follow, follow, follow, where the words grow, bursting from the ground and sprouting, twisting upwards. And everywhere the soil writhes, shaking, rocks spraying into the dusty, moonlit air. Roots explode from the trembling earth, clawing their way from the cracking, breaking world. And one by one, each tree extends a root and slithers forward.

A singular light glimmers in the top window of a skyscraper. The inhabitant, a committed Shakespeare fan, looks out the window into the star speckled gloom and sighs wistfully.

"'Within this three mile may you see it coming; I say, a moving grove!’” she announces prophetically, turning to face her invisible audience. "One of my favourite quotes, that one is."

The vines creep away as the sun begins to shimmer pink above the horizon. Its faint light falls upon the hill where the forest once sprawled, now bare of growth. All that remains is one lonely tree stump, of the first tree to fall.