Seungri wasn't very old, by the standards of his people. Maybe only five hundred years or so - only as long as his forest had been around. He was proud to say that his tree was one of the original forest seeders (humans were always so very concerned with understanding how things made more things, always gendering, but his tree was neither male nor female, like Seungri himself). 

No, for a dryad, he wasn't very old, but that was okay. An older nymph, BoA, had been there to help him, displaced from her woodlands in Greece a long time ago. She had raised him, in a sense - taught him magic and the many languages of the flowerkind, how to interpret the long-winded whispers of the trees and the hushed chatter of the grasses and shrubs. 

When she had intially called him a 'he' (a concept completely foreign to him, really, all of this pronoun nonsense) and taught him the human language of Korean, he had asked her what the difference between 'she' and 'he' was and why BoA was a she but he was not. 

"Our races, nymphs and dryads, are very similar. Where I came from, the humans considered them one and the same. Our abilities are quite similar, but we come from very different avenues. As such, when they first saw us, they saw the forms of nymphs akin to the females of their species, 'women', and believed dryads were the 'male' version. Thus, I am female and you are male because our forms look like human women and men."

He still didn't understand it, not until he saw the two different kinds of humans with his own eyes as they cut through his forest, apparently in some civil war, and killed each other there. He couldn't tell the differences initially, like he hadn't been able to separate his form from that of BoA's, but that was okay. He wasn't able to save those people - soldiers - but that was okay too. 

As time passed, he learned to deal with the destruction of his home, war and industry slowly eroding it, those taking not even having the decency to give back. But again, he would save the saplings and the nuts, planting them away from the looming grey taking over the skyline and plant them close to the salt of the sea, though he knew that wasn't completely safe either. 

The best part about this modernism was that the Hunters had practically vanished, now their family clans only small, ununited factions on commision by some body of people who told the others what to do - BoA had called it a government, but he still didn't understand what it did - to keep the Ethereal races out of the cities. Sometimes, when he was planting seedlings, he would see generations of farmers, would would stare at him wide-eyed. He would smile at them and they would break out of their stupor, ducking away like they hadn't seen him. Occasionally, too, children of those famers would get lost in his woodlands. He would run into them as he checked up on his windblown friends, spreading water and life-magic into them to help them reach the sun, ever drowning in the man-made black skies. These little ones didn't run from him like their parents, didn't look away like the elders. They would come up to him, pressing their small hands into the moss on his legs, the smooth bark of his outer flesh, the earthen brown sweetgrass of growing on the top of his head. 

"You're so lovely." A little girl had cooed at him, tracing over his nose when he knelt down to talk to her. "All the stories say you'll eat us right up, but you're just so lovely."

That particular little girl hadn't been willing to go back home, and he had come to find out that she no longer had one; the same war that was stealing his forest (setting it on fire, no less!) had stolen her home as well, her family vanished along with it. 

"I think they're in Seoul, hiding." She had said, curled up with him one night. "But I can't make it that far. I don't know the way."

That winter had almost seen the poor thing dead. Seungri didn't know how humans braved the cold, but he assumed because work stopped that they hibernated like the trees. It had taken a considerable amount of sweet-talking and a generous gift of life-magic to get an old oak, preparing to rest the winter, to open itself up for an inside tenant. A scavenge of her old town had yielded old, but useful coverings for her exposed flesh and a crop of mushrooms had stopped the young girl from starvation taking her next.Perhaps it also helped that Seungri was what she called a 'human greenhouse', whatever that was. 

That little girl had been found by Hunters a few years later. They had marvelled at her survival while Seungri cowered inside a tree, ready to melt into the earth and vanish from them, but unwilling to leave the girl behind. She had tried to explain how Seungri had helped her, but the lead Hunter had only shaken his head.

 "Stupid girl. Dryads don't help anyone." He had said. "You're lucky he didn't kill you on the spot. Hateful creatures."

As they had dragged her away, back to humankind, she had called out one last mournful goodbye, hand outstretched to him. All of he could do was drop an acorn into her hand, unable to hug her tightly and wish her farewell like he wanted, lest he be torched before her eyes. 

And so he spent the next fifty years alone, BoA having moved on shortly after the wars started. That is, of course, until a he-Siren washed up onto his forest floor. 

The Siren, Daesung, was an odd, curious creature. Like Seungri, he seemed to be able to melt into his element, salt water, even able to turn his whole body to liquid. In his panic, drowning in the oil slick on the surface, he had forgotten about it, only trying to escape the sensation of suffocation. Plus, Daesung had explained, it takes a decent amount of concentration to do it, and to stop breathing until the transformation is complete. 

Seungri came to really like Daesung, and Daesung liked Seungri. They became friends relatively quickly, and Daesung, having learned he could mould his lower half in water form to give himself legs, stayed with him. He was afraid to enter the water again, unnerved and daunted by his experience, even though he was leaving all of the fish and mammals he loved and was fond of back in the ocean. 

But Seungri was happy to have him, especially when the humans came back, massive machines and thick, pluming fire starting at one end of his forest and sweeping across it in a rush. 

Daesung had noticed it first, then Seungri started to hear the growing shrieks of his woodland. Before he could save it, the fire reached his sire tree and Seungri felt the water pumps in his body stop, his whole being freezing with agony. He knew that his tree was sacred - magic given to those trees were rare, and their dryad spawn rarer; the connection between the two was intimate, two lifeforces bound together. 

If it weren't for Daesung, he would have died there, with the only home he'd ever known, the place he'd been born into and thrown his whole life into nuturing. He just . . . He didn't undertstand why. 

"Seungri!" Daesung's voice was desperate, fear up the back of his spine, harshly tugging on his arm. "Seungri!"

The pain was unimaginable, his magic ripping in half. It felt like he was crumbling from the inside out. He couldn't hold himself together, couldn't take the flame consuming his soul. 

"Seungri, no!" Daesung's voice was thick with terror, his face blurry when Seungri collapsed into his arms. The thick arms of the Siren held him fast as he bent down, pressing their lips together, some kind of chill ocean life breathed deep into his chest, hardening the burning timber of his connection to his sire tree into submersed charcoal, the sweet relief of wetness filling the cindered hole where the other half of his soul used to be. 

When Daesung pulled back, gently over his face, he was no longer burning, the hurt more in his heart, a yearning already for what was, but he could not move. Daesung seemed to know this, gathering him in arms made sturdy and powerful though a lifetime of seafaring and the last years he spent climbing trees to keep up with Seungri before taking off towards the sea, jumping in without hesitation, fire jumping at his heels and almost catching him before the surf rose up to meet him, catching the two beings in liquid ice. 

Seungri out then, the cold shock too much for his body to take, even with the insulated warmth of Daesung curled around him.