Lien does not know what she is anymore.

Ostensibly she is still a person, but this...what she is doing. This is not what a human can do. A homo sapien cannot see without eyes and grasp the souls of the unresting dead in their hands. It cannot wind them together into a thread and cast them a world away.

A human cannot lend the twined phantoms their body, does not feel their minds and hearts as they move in borrowed flesh.

She sees them, inside and out and knows what they once were, what they are; the very core of them. She experiences the world beside them, looking through their eyes and feeling with their hands.

One and many. One, and nothing at all.

What would her cousins think? What would they say?

(She is the hunched form of a statue; legs crossed and arms folded across her knees, nine eyes across her face, a gaping mouth clenched shut. She is a twenty-year-old woman; her limbs rakish, her throat thin and bird-like, her face still to childishly round to be taken seriously. She is awake. She asleep. She is a bridge. She is the destination-)

The cost of such a feat is not negligible. It drains her to keep everything spun and anchored, and the effort seeps away at the stores of energy she has sucked from the soil and air. Lien can feel the flow of chakra begin to eat away at her, chipping at the strength she has collected in the decades that have passed.

In the end, she can only do it for so long, so she stops. Calls herself back, breaks the thread holding them together so she might have a little room for herself.

'Wake up,' she whispers without a voice.

And it does, but as with all things, it is not as it was.

What returns is not the isolated souls of the corpses that hang from her branches, but a new thing.

Shiro, it calls itself. A conglomeration of many minds remade into one, shaped into the image of a hivemind that so pleases her, returns from its sojourn with glee instead of the anguish it had. She can feel it, a new entity that buzzes inside of her boughs, a changed presence, so very alert.

It is hungry, her Shiro. Desperate to be alive.

It laughs inside the cradle of her branches, and its voice drips from her white sap.

Madara, who has spent his time standing insensate, gasps at the sound, sputtering awake like a drowning man pulled from water. He sits there, still bound to her by roots and tendrils, feeling the brush of her mind against his.

"You live," he whispers to himself. "You dream."

'We all dream,' she tells him, barely lingering.

Something inside crumples, and she feels that if he were another man, he would weep. She can feel the realization dawning on him, the desperation with which he clings to the idea that it's real, that everything he has known is correct.

A fools effort, but an understandable one. It's never enjoyable to be dragged from what you know and forced to see a different point of view, let alone to be forced to experience several simultaneously.

Lien can see him trying to personalize it, applying his new perspective to the life he has lived. There are flashes of dread mingling with acceptance, a vision of a boy whose life was cut too short, a brother with whom he built a village, and a creation that rejected him. She feels the anger inside of him, the ache of living a lie.

"The irony," he says. "Living an illusion with eyes that can see through them."

He breathes in, and she feels his chakra wavers and flares.

"I will make a better world," the old man spits. "A real world."

This she does not answer. Nobody does, and he's left unsure whether there was anyone to talk to in the first place as she retreats back to her roots, seeking out the other.

A hand rests on her trunk at the declaration, and she can feel Zetsu patting her bark like it's ruffling her hair.

'You did it,' it tells her, hands scratching characters against the wood of her limbs. 'They believe.'

She shivers, causing the pods full of corpses to sway on her branches. What does it matter if she can't remember what she is anymore? If she's losing the borders of herself, turning into something no one will recognize? What is the cost of not being human?

'Once upon a time, I, Zhuang Zhou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou,' she thinks to herself. 'Soon I was awakened, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.''

It matters not whether she is a tree or a woman, Shinju or Lien.

They believe, and she is making the world real.