First thought of the Future

Father Heron shrugged. "What do you want it to mean for you? This life I've given you is yours to live."

Rattles became very quiet. It was a big question. He didn't know these people very well, but he'd only been born just over a day ago. He didn't know much of anything. He thought about the nice dwarven druid, about the mean human Jershon. He thought about the way that the corrupted parts of the woods made him feel, both before and after their cleansing. What did he want?

It dawned on Rattles that, more than anything, he wanted answers. He was near to bursting all the time with wonderings and questions, but he didn't know how to ask them. It seemed that, for now, Father Heron was happy to answer any questions he might have so far.

"Can it mean I stay with you for a while, and help you with your part of the forest?"

Father Heron smiled. "If you like, Rattles, yes. You may stay with me as long as you like."

A worryingly dark expression bloomed across Father Heron's face. "For as long as I live."

Rattles felt a thread of uncertainty prickle at him, but he didn't understand what it was that was bothering him enough to ask the question. So, he instead threw his hands in the air in celebration. "Yay!"

Father Heron's expression cleared again, a calming smile flitting across his face before he turned and stood, addressing the circle again. "Are we rested enough to continue?"

A few groans sounded out as the druids collectively clambered to their feet.

Rattles only now realized, however, that the groaning was only the vocalizations that accompanied stiff muscles and tired lungs. There were no actual words of complaint, neither had there been since the objections brought up concerning his own existence. Rattles surmised that the druids must be very stoic and hardy folk, though he wondered what that meant for him, considering that they did, in fact, deign to complain about him.

While he trusted Father Heron, and believed his insistence that Rattles was no less a person because of his 'undead nature', he wondered what then might be bothering the druids about him so much.

Shrugging to himself and saving the question for later, he resolved to ask Father Heron about it at the earliest convenience. In the meantime, he followed the circle to the next patch of corrupted forest.

Unbeknownst to everyone, a whisp of grey smoke fled the earth as Rattles moved away, settling into a gap between his anklebones.

---

The rest of the night passed, then a good part of the day, before the Father Heron called for a rest. Exhausted, most of the druids simply collapsed on the spot in the bare soil, some instinctively flowing into more comfortable forms. For his part, Father Heron managed to shapeshift into the bird of his namesake and fly to a nearby tree before swiftly and visibly falling asleep.

Rattles wandered over to the shape in the tree, posing as if to call out, but then hesitated. He didn't feel tired himself, but he knew somehow that it was unpleasant to be woken from sleep. He didn't know how he knew, much like he didn't know how he knew the words that everyone used to speak, or how he knew what druids were but not liches.

Trying to be respectful of Father Heron, not to mention his brother and sister druids, he sat down quietly and contemplated these unknowns. Aside from how or why he knew what he did, he decided to focus on understanding what he knew, and what he didn't.

He knew that the reason that everything turned into shades of grey at night was because he had a special sense called darkvision. For some races, it was just too dark to see at all without any light. He knew that humans didn't usually have darkvision, for example. He didn't know how Father Heron or any of the other human druids navigated the dark as easily as everyone else.

He knew that the language that the druids spoke when casting their spell and the language they spoke when talking to him or to each other were different languages, though he didn't know what they were called. He wondered if all magic was spoken in the language that the druids used for it.

He knew that most living things needed to sleep, eat, express waste, and breathe. Most, but not all living things needed to drink water, too. He didn't know how he knew that most beetles and even reptiles got all the water they needed from their food, nor how he knew that most bipedal races capable of speech needed liquid water at least once every three days. He also didn't know how he knew that living things of different sizes needed different amounts of sleep, with most 'humanoid' races needing eight hours a day, with some exceptions.

He knew that magic was accomplished by different people in different ways, though he didn't know all of them. Obviously, druids cast their magic by drawing on nature, though he felt certain somehow that they could also draw on a nature god.

Startled, he realized that he knew what gods were, and even that they could be venerated for power by druids, clerics, and some others. He didn't seem to know any names of any gods, but he knew that gods could be predictable, unpredictable, good, and\or evil.

He felt an instinctive respect for nature gods, and an equally strong and mysterious disrespect for gods of conflict and undeath.

He was again startled by that realization. Why should he, a skeleton, have no love for a god or gods of undeath? Maybe because they were at odds with gods of nature?

If that was so, why did the druids, who clearly loved and venerated nature, tolerate him so well? Was Father Heron that strong? For that matter, why did Father Heron not only spare him, but deign to Awaken him?

Those troubling questions were suddenly swept away by the realization that he knew very intimately what the spell Awaken was, and what it had done to him. The knowledge filled his mind naturally, though like almost everything else he knew, he had no idea how he knew it.