The nights had a shape now.
Find the speck. Move the current outward. Watch where it goes. Try to get it to go the same way twice. Fail. Adjust. Try again until the tiredness came and stop.
It had been doing this for weeks since the book and the results were the same each night with small differences. The current moved. It went a short distance through the body and then lost direction and faded. Sometimes it went left. Sometimes forward. Once it went back toward the speck which made no sense and it spent three nights trying to understand why before giving up and moving on.
The problem was consistency. It could move the current. It could not make it go the same way twice in a row reliably. And a road that went a different direction each time was not a road.
It started watching things differently during the days.
Not just the loud creatures on the road but everything. Beetles moving through the soil. Water finding its way downhill through roots and stones. The current in the trees moving upward through the trunk the same way every time because the structure of the wood gave it no other option. It watched a thin stream of rainwater find the same path down a sloped root three times in a row after the same rain and sat with that for a while.
The water did not decide where to go. The root decided for it.
It thought about this at night while working on the current. The current was not deciding where to go either. It was going wherever the space inside the body offered least resistance, which was different each time because it had not yet made any part of the space more open than the rest.
The root had a groove worn into it from water passing over it many times before. Slight but there. Enough that new water found it without trying.
It picked a direction. Not because it had a reason for that direction over any other. Just because it needed to pick one and start wearing a groove.
Left and slightly forward from the speck, toward the front of the body. It moved the current that way on the first try and it went left and slightly forward and faded. Second try, same direction, it went left and slightly forward and faded a little further out than the first time. Third try it went somewhere else entirely and it stopped and waited for the tiredness to pass and tried again.
This went on for two weeks.
Small progress. The current went the chosen direction more often than not by the end of the first week. More often than not became usually by the end of the second. Usually was not the same as always and always was not the same as a groove worn deep enough to be reliable but it was movement in one direction which was more than it had before.
Then one night it went left and slightly forward on the first try and the second try and the third try in a row without deviation and it stopped and lay still and read the path the current had taken three times and found it very slightly different from the surrounding space, not much, the thinnest suggestion of a preferred direction worn into something that had not had a preferred direction before.
The beginning of something.
It tried a fourth time and the current went somewhere else and it stopped for the night.
In the morning it went to the road out of habit and sat in the tall grass and listened to travelers and came back with two new words it did not have before. Then it spent the afternoon watching the current move through a large tree nearby, up through the roots and into the trunk, the same path every time because the wood had been directing it the same way for longer than anything in the forest had been alive.
That was what it was building. Not in wood. Not over hundreds of years. But the same principle.
It was thinking about this when the tongue found something new.
Not a traveler on the road. Not a beast moving through its territory. Something that had entered the Sunken Green from the north and had not left. A warm signature with a faint current inside it, weaker than the hunter from before, weaker than the groups that had fought in the flat area. But there.
It had been in the forest for two days already.
It read the signature from where it was sitting near the old tree. Not moving fast. Not hunting beasts the way the others had hunted. Moving slowly through the deeper forest, stopping for long periods, the current inside it sitting quiet and low rather than pulling inward and concentrating the way currents did before action.
Not hunting.
It read the direction the signature had been moving based on where it was now versus where it had first appeared two days ago and worked out the rough path it had taken through the Sunken Green.
It was not passing through.
It was looking for somewhere to stay.