Dema watched Peter as she ate. There was something familiar about him. He was connected to the forest dream, that she could tell through her shaman awareness, but there was something else. This was puzzling, until she noticed that it was her body that recognized him, not her mind. 

This was the same hunter who had found her body and buried it, while she was lost in the forest dream. She dimly remembered going back to her body, and coming out of the grave, and that there had been a cabin nearby.

But this man was no ordinary hunter. The forest dream was open to her, and he was too much a part of it. In fact, she thought, in some sense he was the forest dream, personified. But if so, then why had he buried her body?

Then she knew. The man who had buried her was the real Peter. This was the forest entity, animating Peter's body. He was watching her closely, and she saw his smile broaden as it all fell into place for her. Clearly he could read her as easily as she could read him, if not more so. 

She looked around, shaman perceptions alert. There was no gun, no trap. The rabbit had walked right into his hands. Its pelt had already been buried, quite respectfully, a few yards away. The fire had been started without the aid of matches. These were not the acts of a modern hunter.

"So," she said, "What have you done with Peter?"

"Oh, he's here. He's a big help with the language. I suspect that, to him, this is a dream."

"And who exactly are you? I mean, how did you get to be the spirit of the forest, the king of the woods?"

He laughed. "I was a shaman at one time, much as you are now. I simply became so attuned to the forest that, when it came time to give up my body, I stayed on here. It's a very peaceful state, as you've discovered."

"Why didn't you come forward the first time? I could have used the help."

"You might say I was too deep in the dream, had been asleep too long. I was not very aware of events on your scale of things. It was your presence, your actions, that brought me here, focused my attention." 

Dema absorbed that silently for a few moments, recalling the entities of the Devil's Cave near Catemaco, how they too had come to accept a timeless existence. She realized, then, that even that had been a choice, and she had to respect it.

"As I respect yours," he murmured.

Dema looked up. "Thanks," she said. "But I have a problem. This business of absorbing the mass of things that still want to be part of the forest, and get the idea that I am you."

He looked chagrined at that. "I don't know how to help you. You could join me here of course. You would be welcome. But I know that's not what you want."

"Thanks for the offer. Sincerely. You are right, I could find peace here. But much as I sometimes try to deny it, I made my own choice long ago, and must heed the call of the Lamia."

She knew that as she said these words he became aware of her heritage, of the antiquity of the Lamia line, and her intimate connection to it. He understood that in a way her dream was as old as his, maybe older, and he regarded her with new respect.

"I am truly sorry," he said, "But in truth I do not know how to help you. As the beetles and bats are to you, so is the entire forest to me. I do not have just one body. I can if I choose occupy any of my creatures, as I have occupied Peter here. But I am not Peter. I do not do what you do. Your ability to learn the essence of a creature and become like it in form is foreign to me, and the strangeness of what you do was I think a part of the confusion you experienced here before. 

"I do not change one creature into another creature, or alter the native form of any part of the forest, any part of myself. I accept what each part chooses to be, and it becomes part of what I am. I accept all forms of life into my dream, but my awareness is mainly of the life essence itself, not so much of the physical forms and their actions. I merely guide and protect the dream, as much as I can. It is not in me to do more." 

Dema was silent. She pondered what he had said, relating it to her own experience. She understood that she had taken on something of the essence of the forest, the way it drew life to itself as a communal organism. She had begun subsuming living substance in a similar way. 

There was, had to be, some deep agreement in her with this process, or it would not have continued. She withdrew her awareness from the forest dream, and focused it inward, getting deeply in communication with the life essence of her own body, more so than ever before, to separate out that which belonged from that which didn't.

Sure enough, there remained a part of her that was bound, not by the normal processes of body chemistry, but by its attraction to the forest dream. She did not want to deny the dream, and that had been the problem. But she did want to separate it from her body. 

Peter helped her, after all. As she became aware of the forest dream parts, he did too, and he simply invited them back into himself. Not himself as Peter, but himself as the forest. She realized, and he did too, that her earlier acceptance of the forest dream, and the forest dream's own acceptance of her, had been so complete, and her shifting of forms had been so strange to it, that some of the forest essence had clung to her willy-nilly as she became one forest creature after another. 

Dema experienced a sense of relief, as the last of the forest essence left her. There was a sense of loss for her as well, but that was remedied by opening herself to the forest dream again, though somewhat more warily now. She realized that it would be all too easy to merge with it again, as the entity she knew as Peter had done long ago. But they both understood that, for now, she must pursue her purpose as the Lamia, and help protect the forest dream in her own way, along with the other innocents she had charged herself to defend.