Who: Querry and open What: Madness descends on the guardian of Central Park When: Saturday night Where: Central Park, Querry's tree
She hated cold, she thought with a miserable shiver as she dropped down from one of the low hanging branches of her tree. Cold was an old and evil enemy, it cut at summer and gave way to spring.
She'd never had bones, not really. Dryads couldn't be blood and bones, too much of them was taken up with leaves and roots - roots, in Querry's case, that spread down deep into the earth, down to soil that had never seen the metalic glimmer of a skyscraper, and had never felt the rumbling of subways or the sting of acid rain. That soil was rich with the thoughts of academics, college students, and little mortals taking their first crack at Edith Hamilton's Mythology (and a few who had managed to secure a copy of the now long-ridiculed New Hellenism by a Dr. David Underwood). Querry's roots reached far, far below the city and kept her happy - weak in the winter, but strong enough to sleep. Except this winter had not been one of rest.
She'd been in a stupor all season, wandering from one snow bank to the next with her head heavy and full of worry. All of the leaves had fallen off of her tree, and the birds didn't chirp and there were no squirrels to be found. It wasn't right, it was wrong, it was tainted. And one night, when the dark had creeped in along with the ice, and the homeless had gone, not so desparate for a space as to risk the coming storm, the good thoughts were gone, and Querry was alone with the cold.
She felt the evil first and ran instinctively, her bare feet stinging from the snow. It was nameless and faceless and evil, evil run!
"Help!" She wailed as she ran, but it was too late, the sickness in the soil had already sunk into the roots of her tree, and she was her tree, heart and soul and mind. As she ran, her toenails blackened, then the bottoms of her feet. She ran and ran - the tree! Why had she left her tree? She needed her tree- She skidded to the left and glanced down, then shrieked as she watched the black snap up her right leg. Her footsteps were labored and hurt but still she scampered. By the time she was within seeing distance up her tree, she was on her hands and knees, scrambling away from the sickness that had shot up both of her legs to her midsection.
Bits of the black began to flake away as she slithered to the trunk, throwing her arms around it. It was too late, she tried to sink into the trunk but the black snapped over her eyes and into her tree with her. Cold shot into her core, as vile and sick as ever. Her howl of pain echoed through the park and the black snapped over the branches of her tree. The bones of the tree twisted and stretched to the sky, and by the time she had finished screaming, her tree was scarcely a tree at all or, at least, it could have hardly have been surmised to be made of anything natural. The branches of the black tree groaned as they swayed in the wind, as the madness took the Dryad and twisted her.