It was incredibly gratifying to Puck to see the woods on his little world come back to life. He had hiked all over the tiny moon, covering almost every inch of it, tending to the new growth as well as seeing to the older trees and plants. He'd even seen a few bugs – not gigantic ones, mind, not like the carvings in the walls of the tree home he'd claimed as his primary base of operations, not like the ones in the occasional dream or passing vision, but smaller things like fireflies and dragonflies and even the odd pillbug. Somehow he knew there was a name for them: mosies, which was a funny-sounding name, but they kind of did just mosy along a bit, didn't they?

And these hikes reminded him of the childhood tramps through the forests of his native England that he often went on with his family. He'd been to Sherwood (and played Robin Hood, whom he was named after), he'd been to New Forest, he'd been to all the parks around London. It was no wonder he'd come to be the Senshi of the Woods, with all the folklore that title carried. It all made him extremely happy.

Puck was hiking through an area of his homeworld he'd not been through before, about an hour's trek from his tree home if he was guesstimating right. Uranus and its vertical rings loomed large and blue in the sky overhead, or at least what he could see of it through the dense branches and dark leaves of the trees in this part of the moon. He was walking along a deep, wide trench through the trees, which arched overhead and made the whole thing feel like he was walking through a tunnel. It felt very weird… yet oddly familiar. His skin tingled and prickled a bit, the hairs on his arms raising. Was this something to do with some of the visions and dreams he'd had when staying here? The sense that he'd been here before was almost overwhelming. What had made this trench?

Proceeding with caution, he approached what looked to be the end of the tunnel-like path. It opened up into a wide clearing, mostly dirt, encircled with a ring of rocks. Off to his right he noticed the opening to a vast cavern; he'd never seen it before, he just had the sense that it was immense. And important. He walked slowly up to the mouth of the cavern, peering into the darkness. "Hello?" he called, not loudly at all – but the cavern echoed the word, the sound reverberating back, back into the depths of the darkness. He wanted to run – had he awakened something?

Then a flash, a moving image rushed over his mind, and he was transfixed:

Puck, but different, smaller, a child, standing in front of this very cavern, only it wasn't empty – it contained a huge mosie, ancient and covered with moss and lichen, filling the opening. The word "You…" penetrated his brain, emanating from the creature. "You." A strange feeling washed over him, and he somehow knew that he had been selected, to be the one –

As quickly as the vision had come, it was gone, leaving Puck standing alone shaking in the middle of the clearing. "What the ******** was that," he muttered to himself. But he knew what it was, on a primal, instinctual level: a vision of his former life, the moment he'd been selected by the Guardian to be the Senshi of this world. He shuddered, his breath coming quick and ragged. The visions usually weren't this intense…

Turning on his heel, he hastily departed the clearing, leaving a trail of brambles and twigs and leaves and mossy footprints on the ground behind him, that lingered and quickly faded from view.

(wc: 640)