For eight hours, you surrender yourself to the slow rhythm of the living world.
You press your hands against the trunk of a tree and open your spirit to its ancient presence. Breath becomes root. Thought becomes sap. Your heartbeat falls into rhythm with the pulse of the tree, and for those eight hours, neither you nor the tree stands alone.
When the communion is complete, the tree gives freely of its heart.
The bark parts without wound or violence, peeling away from the living wood as though the tree itself were opening its heart. Deep within, the heartwood is drawn forth by unseen magic, emerging as a single flawless log. Its surface is impossibly smooth, yet a thin layer of bark remains upon it—seamless and unbroken, covering even its ends.
But the tree is not diminished.
Where its heartwood once stood, the hollow is filled with the power of the covenant. A luminous knot of primal magic takes root within the empty core, its energy spreading slowly through the tree's roots, branches, and every growing ring yet to come.
The tree will live longer than it otherwise would have. Its wood grows hard against rot and resilient against pestilence. Its roots take deeper hold, its branches grow stronger, and its boughs become heavy with leaves, flowers, fruit, and seed.
The tree does not merely survive the loss of its heartwood.
It flourishes because of it.
And so the exchange is complete: the tree gives you its heart, and in return, you give the tree a new one.
- You can also pass through nonmagical plants without being slowed by them and without taking damage from them if they have thorns, spines, or a similar hazard as the plants seem to bend away from you to make a path for you.
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