Oak King story as told by The Old Man
We’ve had human Oak Kings down the years such as Aurthur Rackham, and in more recent years, Charles de Lint and Christopher Golden, but he was most decidedly was not human though his glamour would be a proper guise for most humans not to know that when looking at him.
He was made of roots, leaves and a skeletal structure not of bone, but of living oak. Seen without his guise, he resembled a tree trying to be human in appearance and not coming that close as his proportions were simply wrong — too many joints in the limbs, shoulders too wide and even a skull that even I found painful to look at. He had no eyes but could obviously sense the world around him; no ears nor mouth either. It sounded like a riddle I’d had been told by a Norn centuries upon ago.
When I looked even closer at him, I could see that everything on the surface of him was moving visibility — leaves rusting though there be no breeze here in the Pub, branches and roots questing for something, and his whole being pulsing with eldritch energies. Damn he was unsettling even to my ravens who were perched in the rafters.
(I’ve never told the humans who live on this Estate that the Pub itself stands on a crossroads between here and somewhere else as some of them have enough trouble sleeping as it is without knowing that.)
My luck must have been slightly cursed that late evening as he shambled towards me. I sighed deeply, put away The History of Raven Kings I’m reading and turned towards this being. I inclined my head slightly towards him as I bow to no one, human or otherwise. He, not being human, didn’t notice my intended rebuff.
A voice entered my head, deep and somehow akin to dry oak leaves rustling in a Winter wind. A voice I’d rather not have heard ever asked me a question that I could not answer, nor really wanted to know that the question existed. Even My Ravens were visibly quite agitated by the question.
Emotions flushed rapidly through me from him — irritation, anger, puzzlement, even sadness And then he was simply gone. Not there. As if he’d never been here. I quickly wrote notes of this encounter and sketched him out in detail in my Journal as I knew deep in my bones that I’d forget all of this within minutes if I didn’t.
Now what were we talking about? Do remind me…
