The root circle was empty by midday.
It read the space from the undergrowth for a while after the signature had faded beyond the tongue's range, the warmth of three weeks of occupation still sitting in the soil and bark of the circle, already cooling. The small things he had used and left behind were scattered around the roots. A piece of cloth. Something broken it had never been able to identify from a distance. The ash of small fires built low and careful against the largest root where the smoke would disperse through the canopy without gathering.
The book was on the ground where he had left it the morning before.
It waited until the forest had settled back into its usual sounds before approaching. Came out of the undergrowth slowly and read the air around the circle out of habit, finding nothing beyond the fading warmth and the smell of someone who had lived somewhere for a while and then stopped living there.
It picked the book up with its nose and carried it back to its territory.
The cover marks were the same as they had been the evening before, formal and dense. It opened it carefully and found the inside of the cover and stopped.
He had written there. Not the small tight marks of the printed pages inside but larger, the kind of marks someone makes with something in their hand, slightly uneven, pressing harder on some strokes than others. Three lines. Sitting alone on the inside cover with space around them the way his question about what it was had sat alone on that page weeks ago.
It read the first line slowly.
I don't know what you are.
Second line.
But you knew what I needed before I did.
It stopped at the third line for a long time. Most of the words were clear. One was not, sitting in the middle of the line, a word it had collected the shape of from his pages without finding its meaning yet, one of the idea words that did not point at anything physical.
It read around it.
Whatever you are I hope _____ finds you.
It sat with the unknown word and tried to pull its meaning from the words around it. Something he wished for it. Something that could find a thing. Not a person, the grammar was wrong for a person. Something that moved toward things or arrived at things or came to things over time.
It read the line again.
Whatever you are I hope _____ finds you.
It read the word itself, the shape of it, and went back through every page he had left over three weeks looking for it and found it once in the middle of a dense paragraph it had only half understood, sitting next to a word it knew meant something earned after a long time of working toward it.
It went back to the inside cover and read the third line one more time.
Whatever you are I hope fortune finds you.
It closed the book and set it with the others and lay still for a while.
Then it opened the book to the first page and started reading.
The language inside was harder than the pages he had left. Denser, more formal, the grammar more complicated. It got through the first page slowly, understanding maybe two thirds of it, and moved to the second and understood a little less and kept going anyway.
By the time the light faded it was six pages in and the current work was still waiting and the tiredness was already sitting behind its eyes from the reading alone.
It closed the book and lay in the dark and worked on the speck.
Left and slightly forward. Eight times out of ten now. The current traveled a little further before fading each week, the path worn slightly deeper each night, slow and consistent the way the stream wore its channel through the soil, not fast but always in the same direction.
It stopped when the tiredness came.
The forest was quiet around it and the books were stacked beside it and somewhere past the edge of the Sunken Green a person was on a road going wherever he was going carrying whatever had followed him in here and it was none of its concern anymore.
It had a new book.
It went to sleep.