His name was Brandon, is what I remember, and he taught me everything I know about lightshaping.

I met Brandon when I was twelve. It was the first day of middle school and, as I approached the end of the single, off-pink painted building and the wide hallway with the four doors that would be our classrooms, from the shadows, Brandon appeared.

“Hey, you must be new,” he said and gave me his name.

His amber eyes, like two crystallized stars aglow in the night sky, and his soft, lunar smile invited me into his world. I’d never met someone so beautiful. I didn’t know what to do.

Into the scarlet acorn Sam had plucked from the boughs he whispered, “I wish for love, beloved. I’m tired of the heartbreak. Please help me.”

As the ancestral tomes had instructed, Sam kneeled before the oak and he laid the offering on the fluffed earth. Gray tendrils broke the soil, buried the seed. Throbbing cracks of black earth laced over the auburn bark. Mud- and gold sap-coated roots twisted into legs, engorged into a torso and arms, then curled into a head. Liquid moothed into flesh and earth congealed into loose, black hair. A man appeared and the seed charred black as the moon.

“From the branches, I often watched you speak with my father and care for him,” said the man. “I’ve waited a long time to meet you.”