The meadow was somewhere in Montana.
She did not know the name of the place. She did not need to.
She was a woman in a field on a good morning, and that was all she was, and she felt unusually satisfied in a way she could not quite account for — as if something had been decided for her while she was not paying attention, and the decision had been a kind one.
She walked.
She had no particular place to be. She was not sure, in fact, why she had come this far from the road. The grass was tall. The sky was wide. Those were reasons enough.
After a while she stopped.
She put her arms out to her sides, the way a person does when the air is good and the light is good and the body wants to be a little bigger for a minute. She closed her eyes and tilted her face up toward the sky and drew a long breath, and the air was grass and soil and something warm a long way off, and it was an entirely ordinary breath except that it made her smile for no reason at all.
She held it.
She let it out.
She turned — slowly, without thinking, the way a person turns when they are enjoying a field and want to see more of it. A full circle, eyes half-closed against the sun, the meadow moving past her in bands of gold and green.
Her head lowered. Her eyes opened.
And she saw the tree.
It was standing alone in the middle of the meadow, massive and green and impossibly old. A tree in a field. Grass at its roots. Branches spreading wide and full, leaves moving in the same wind that was moving through her hair.
She found herself walking toward it before she thought about walking toward it.
She did not hurry. There was no reason to hurry. She walked the way a person walks toward a thing that is pulling them gently, without force, the way you walk toward music you recognize without knowing the song. Her fingers trailed through the wildflowers as she went — yellow and pale blue and white — the blossoms nodding against her palm as she passed.
She reached the tree and put her hand against the bark.
Massive and scarred and warm. The warmth moved into her hand and up her arm and settled somewhere behind her breastbone, and for a moment she felt a familiarity so deep and so unreasonable that she almost laughed — as if she had been here before, or the tree had been somewhere she had been before, or something she did not have the words for.
She left her hand there a long time.
Then she walked around to the broad side of the trunk where the grass was deepest, and she lay down at the base of the tree with her back against the roots and her legs stretched out in the sun.
She looked up through the branches.
The light came down in pieces, gold on gold, the leaves moving gently over her face.
She smiled.
She closed her eyes.
The End. For the Time Guardian. The beginning of a New Frontier.