[@Jumbus] [b]The Weeping Sam[/b]

[i]The Elm tree was eighty feet tall, by swift estimation. Its rotted state is revealed by the break in the tree's core; the once great deciduous plant had swayed and splintered at a point roughly eight feet off the ground. This meant that a significant portion of the tree had fallen and snapped through the canopy of its nearby brethren, cascading the destruction of its own fall into an avalanche of broken branches and fallen leaves. Such is the way of nature.

The standing portion of its stump is coated in a rising colony of broad-capped mushrooms, climbing atop one another along the north side of the dead tree and forming the facsimile of a staircase up its surface. Considering her familiarity with the region and the timeline of these things, she can ascertain that the rot must have been set in for quite some time and that the mushroom colony had already begun forming before the inevitable collapse.

In this spot of the Weeping Sam, Rowan experiences a strange sensation in the wake of the fallen tree; the canopy, shattered as it is and broken apart by the death of the forest giant, is opened and allows a much greater amount of sunlight through than is typical of the dour forest. Rather than the dappling of visibility through a canvass of leaves, Rowan witnesses the forest floor in plain, unhindered, sunlight. The tumbled Elm further has broken open the earth, and already has begun to reconstitute itself into the forest ecology with the assistance of the mushrooms- as well as other forest entities.

When she first enters the clearing, she seems unnoticed by a female deer who is making great progress in stripping the upper boughs of their moss and lichen. If Rowan had to guess at a cause of the tree's death, it was the seemingly suffocating layer of ivy that had amassed in its upper branches- ivy that was now feeding the herbivores of the forest floor.[/i]