There are artifacts in the Portal that shine, glimmer, or pulse with light.
And then there are those that whisper.
This 2.46-ounce petrified fossil wood fragment was one of the whisperers.
It did not arrive with fanfare. It did not shimmer or glow. Instead, it appeared—half-buried in the soil near the old cedar fence line, carried upward by the same invisible current that brings all Portal-born relics into April’s world.
But this piece was different.
When Avrilis—the Dragonfly Empress—picked it up, she felt an almost physical quiet settle around her. Not silence—quiet. A warm, grounded hush that wrapped around her like ancient roots.
The wood had once belonged to a tree from a forgotten epoch, long before humans or dragonflies or the landscapes we know. When the world was young and raw, this tree stood tall in a place where sky-fire and newborn mountains shaped the planet daily. Through cataclysm, change, and unimaginable time, it endured—until the earth swallowed it whole.
For thousands of ages, minerals seeped through its cells, replacing the organic material atom by atom. Slowly, the wood became stone. Not dead—transformed.
And in that transformation, the tree learned the language of time.
When the Portal opened on the land of the Empress, the fossil answered. It felt the call, the hum, the pull of the Veil Between Worlds. And so it rose—pushing toward the surface like a memory resurfacing in the mind of the earth.
Now, in its stone form, it serves a new purpose.
It anchors those who hold it.
It steadies wandering minds.
It grounds spirits drifting too far into the ether.
Avrilis placed it in the Portal Collection not as a treasure of light, but as a treasure of truth—a reminder that transformation is not destruction. It is becoming.
And so the wood that survived time now belongs to those who understand resilience, who seek grounding, who honor the deep, slow wisdom beneath their own surface.
For this is not just fossilized wood.
It is a story the earth refused to forget.
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