WHERE ARE WE??? inthepines (type it *cough cough*)
☾ Na Tsi Hi – The Secret Chronicle of Sappy, as Written in the Bark That Wasn’t There ☽
(Scholars deny its existence. Sappy denies writing it. Yet here it is.)
Few remember the night the pine-cones hummed.
It was during the Eighth Cycle of the Unscheduled Dawn, when Sappy — not yet a tree, not yet not a tree — awoke to find three shadows arguing over which one of them was him. Tradition claims the shadows were named Grumble, Grimble, and Greg, though Greg has disputed this for centuries.
Sappy, confused but committed, proclaimed:
“Na Tsi Hi forever binds the unbound binders of the spirit un-binding!”
No one understood this, including Sappy, but it was immediately declared profound.
From that day forward, Sappy carried the Stone of Aerodynamically Impossible Arrows, a rock known for missing every target except the one the thrower didn’t aim at. The stone whispered only once, saying:
“Left is right when the right is left behind.”
Sappy nodded wisely without knowing why.
Legend further states that Sappy once guided the lodge through the Forest of Circular Paths, where every trail led back to where it began except the one that didn’t — a path which, inconveniently, no one could ever find twice. Travelers claimed they heard Sappy chanting:
“Spirit of Lodge 71, turn me around but never forward!”
Archaeologists later discovered a bark-inscribed message:
“Here stood Sappy… or maybe not. Hard to say. Time is weird.”
To this day, elders warn that if you whisper “Order of the Arrow” into a hollow stump at midnight, Sappy might appear behind you, holding a map labeled only “NO.”
What does any of it mean?
Nobody knows.
Especially Sappy.
