Hide and seek…

*

“Don’t you think it’s odd,” says Wen, “Osiris ends up in a pillar hewn from a tree, Odin hangs from a tree to gain sacred knowledge and Christ dies on a cross cut from a tree?”
“Well it’s quite clearly the same story if that’s what you mean.”
“You know Don,” says Wen, almost appreciatively, “only you could have used the phrase ‘quite clearly’ in that sentence.”
“There’s also the Merlin, who falls from a height into a tree, and seeing as though you appear to be going all historical on me these days, we might as well throw into the mix as well the Black Boy who hid in a tree before escaping to France.”
“People do hide in trees though.”
“Children hide in trees all the time, but when a ‘once and future’ king hides in a tree it probably alludes to something a little bit more fundamental than a game of hide-and seek.”
“To what does it allude though?”
“Do you want my personal, probably unprovable, opinion upon this matter or something more acceptable to the mainstream?”
“And since when have I ever wanted anything remotely acceptable to the mainstream?”
“I think they’re all Green Men.”
“Which isn’t saying very much at all, Donald Sams, seeing as though no one has really satisfactorily explained what the Green Men, which pepper our churches in veritable abundance, allude to either?”
“The Green Man is the anthropomorphic representation of a tree spirit.”
“Blood and sand,” says Wen, “that’s so mind-numbingly obvious I’m surprised the question was ever posed. How did we miss that one?”
“We lose sight of these things from time to time.”
“Somewhat ironic then, isn’t it, that our mass information age could be regarded as the darkest, darkest time of all.”
“Not in the slightest, that’s usually the way it works.”

Extract from Doomsday: Dark Sage