And as life came to be, so sudden and overtaking, the end reached the forest in the most unexpected way.
The woman was advised to leave when she confronted the big machines. She was told to stop the nonsense when every patch that got taken down was suddenly regrown the very next day. She was warned to leave the workers alone when the machines were overflowed in nature.
Nothing stopped her. No man, no threat, no comically large machine.
But her own self. Oh, that was her downfall. And as the days got colder, shorter, heavier, so did her magic.
Exhaustion took over the woman slowly, clear in her expression, in her skin, in the way her body morphed to nothing but a vessel. A single creature can not stop the human greediness, no matter how hard she tries, no matter where it comes from.
As life came to be, so did the end.
And the village got to see their precious fairy, their woods nymph, the ever lively protector of their fields, and animals, and life, fall to her knees as her own home was destroyed. Too weak to fight, too consumed to try at all.
It was painful, a pain she had never known before. Not even a million kids ripping off the flowers from the ground could compare.
She wondered, is this the kind of torture she had heard about that happened only in hell?
Then, earth must be her own inferno.
Her dear tree was the last to fall, uprooted, killed without mercy, without a care. Centuries of history, of bottled power, of essence... Gone.
The woman, who often laid to rest at the feet of her creation, meets her end in a cold bed, like an elderly forgotten by everyone and left to die in their sleep.
She'll come back one day, years from now. Decades even. Or maybe, in another life, another world, where everything's more gentle. More caring.