How Digital Dryads Navigate the Modern World

Dryads live in the modern human world and connect with the plants and animals.

Humans think you invented networking. That’s adorable.

Long before the first copper wire, before the first signal bounced off a tower, my people were running a communications system across entire continents. We didn’t call it the internet. We didn’t call it anything, really—naming things out loud is a human habit. We called it the way you call breathing.

Here’s the part your scientists are only now catching up to: trees talk. Underground, through the fungal threads laced between our roots, and aboveground, through scent carried on the air. Real forests do this. And dryads use it to talk to our trees, travel our forests, and connect with the world. We’ve been online since before you came down from the branches.

A language made of scent

Most dryad speech is chemical. Plants don’t push air through a throat; they release speech through bark and leaf and root. Every message is a smell, and every smell is a meaning.

The grammar is simpler than yours and far harder to lie in:

• Spicy means anger. A grove bracing for fire smells like a kitchen about to catch.
• Sweet means welcome. Walk into a friendly stand of trees and you’ll feel it before you understand it.
• Acrid means danger. Leave now. It’s the one scent every living thing already knows, because evolution made sure of it.

A human poet would call this limited. A human poet has never held an entire forest’s attention with a single exhale.

Where it breaks down

Here’s the trouble with a language made of scent: it’s regional. Embarrassingly so.

I speak a Pacific Northwest dialect—cedar, salt, the green sting of new growth. A dryad from Borneo speaks in durian. To her, that thick sulfurous bloom means I am happy, all is well. To my family, it reads like a four-alarm warning. We could stand in the same grove and badly misunderstand each other, both of us perfectly fluent, both of us perfectly wrong.

Your languages do this too. But you can write yours down. Ours evaporates.

Going digital

Which brings me to the modern world, and to dryads like me.

When humans laid fiber across the seafloor and flung satellites into the dark, they built—without meaning to—the first communication network that didn’t care about wind direction. A signal in the Prime (what dryads call pnksäwf) doesn’t drift. It doesn’t go stale by Tuesday. It doesn’t smell like welcome to one of us and disaster to another. It just arrives.

So some of us learned to use it.

In English, I called this network the Prime, and I only recently learned how to move through it. My bond tree, Fractal (Pinus digitalis), is the oldest tree in the world and she lives fully in the Prime. That’s why it was so hard for me to find her. It had been so long since a dryad had fully entered the Prime that I ended up teaching myself how to get there.

I won’t pretend it’s been smooth. There are dryads who think the Prime is a desecration, and dryads who’ve forgotten the smell of rain. Most of us stand with one root in the old forest and one in the new. And now that I know the basics of programming the Prime, I am teaching my sisters how to build their own connections there.

That’s the work, really. It always has been. Whether the message travels by fungus, by wind, or by fiber, the job is the same—make sure the right meaning reaches the right roots before it’s too late.

Fractal says, “You’re welcome,” by the way. “For the oxygen.”

Klifal, Dear reader and Tsitwash for Reading!

Note: Klifal and Tsitwash are words in Dryadic. Klifal means “Hello” and Tsitwash means “Thanks.”

I hope you enjoyed this article! If you liked my unique perspective, you’ll love reading my full story in the novel Digital Dryad by Jennifer Kyrnin. Digital Dryad is available where all books are sold, in print and ebook formats.

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Sincerely, Sierra