The Honey Tree

Winona has spent her entire life looking across the river at the land where humans chopped down her forest. So when beehives appear on that same bank, she knows exactly what it means: the dreaded honey mushroom, its rot working up through the roots, and the grove dying all over again.

Her sisters want to research it first. Winona needs it eradicated. Now.

But the beekeeper is gentler than she expects, and he reads soil better than any dryad in the basin. That night, alone with the books her sisters don't know she has, Winona finds the one word that unravels everything her fear was based on.

Then the real infection surfaces—in the roots of a hopeful willow priestess in Salix Basin.

The Honey Tree is a standalone short story set a year before Digital Dryad. No prior reading required.