Kael hated this tree. The old elm his teacher, Elias, dragged into the workshop wasn’t a material-it was an insult. Its trunk ran crooked, twisting as if in a death spasm. Dark, almost black knots stared back like blind eyes. Deep fissures split the bark like scars.

For a week Kael had tried to carve a falcon from it. In his mind it had to be the perfect falcon-sleek wings pressed to the body, a proud head, the embodiment of velocity and clean lines.

But the wood resisted.

The chisel stuck in the stubborn grain. The gouge slipped. When he tried to shave off the ugly knot on the head of the future bird, the wood around it fractured into fine cracks. Kael cursed and flung the tool aside.

“It’s defective,” he snapped toward the corner where Elias sat. The old man wasn’t working; he simply held a block of raw pine, slowly stroking it as though listening to something only he could hear.

“Wood is never defective, Kael,” the master replied softly without looking up. “There are only deaf carvers.”

“It won’t let me make what I want!” the apprentice flared.

“Have you ever asked what it wants?”

Elias rose, stepped to the battered elm, and ran his palm across it. His fingers moved tenderly-not like a master, but like a healer. He traced the outline of that very knot, followed the arc of a crack.

“You see the falcon you invented in your head,” he said. “You’re trying to pull that image over this tree like a new hide on an old soldier. The wood is screaming, and you’re angry that it screams.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?”

“Listen,” Elias answered. “Stop being a conqueror. Become a companion. Don’t try to fix anything. Just watch.”

Kael took up the gouge again-but didn’t cut. For a handful of long minutes he simply looked at the elm, turning it toward the light. His gaze didn’t judge, didn’t hunt for flaws. It was as if he were saying hello.

He began to notice how the light played inside the cracks, how the knot felt less like a blemish and more like a tightly wound knot of strength. Touching it, he closed his eyes and tried to feel how that branch fought the wind, how it reached for the sun, bending yet never breaking.

Then his hand moved. Not against the wild bend of the trunk, but with it. He didn’t carve smooth, folded wings. Instead he used the mad curve to become the sweeping arc of a wing gathering to strike.

He didn’t shave away the black knot. He made it the falcon’s eye. And that eye, framed by the dark grain around it, emerged not as a dot but as a living, fierce orb brimming with feral wisdom. The deep crack he’d first wanted gone became the border between feathers, lending the wing astonishing texture and depth.

He worked in silence, and another sound filled the workshop. The rasp of struggle vanished. In its place came a soft, singing hush, as though the wood itself were shedding the unnecessary, trusting hands that at last heard it.

When Kael finished, the figure on the bench wasn’t the pristine, slick falcon from his fantasies. It was something infinitely more alive. It was the spirit of a storm embodied in wood. Its wings flung wide in a fierce surge, its head tilted in predatory focus, and the black knot-eye seemed to look straight through Kael. It wasn’t beautiful. It was true.

Elias entered the workshop quietly. He studied the carving for a long moment, then the apprentice. The old man smiled the way one smiles at a familiar miracle.

“This isn’t the falcon you invented. It’s the one that always lived in this tree. You wanted it sterile. It wanted to live. You tried to silence it. And now it speaks,” Elias said.

Kael looked at the falcon and, for the first time, saw not the flaws of the material but its story. He understood that mastery isn’t making the world obey your plan. It is becoming quiet enough to hear the music already playing inside it.