Not her. She required no believers, no supplicants at all. Even if something unthinkable should happen to the Tree of Life, its juices flowed within her and made her totally, irrevocably immortal. She was the only wood nymph who didn't even need a tree, although there was this instinctual affinity with them. Wood nymphs had no need to eat; they made their energy from sunlight or could absorb it indirectly from plants. She didn't even need to drink like the others of her kind; the fluids of the Tree never evaporated and never wore out. Lack of carbon dioxide to breathe or prolonged cold might make her go dormant, but that was the extent of it, and that wasn't a very pleasant experience, as she'd discovered. It kind of felt, well, like death in slow motion, not quite asleep or awake but very definitely aware — and the nausea after coming out of it lasted what seemed forever.

Sister wood nymphs weren't much company, either. They had rather boring and basic lives, had no major life experiences, and, unlike her, couldn't travel far enough not to get back to their trees by dusk. Even if they had great mental potential, which they didn't, this didn't exactly give them much of a chance to broaden their points of view. In fact, they weren't quite as smart as the bimbos they looked like, and emotionally they were something like thirteen. And frankly, that was all they needed to be in either area. Their entire function in life was to create a psychic group that could maintain their woods.

That and one other thing. The wood nymphs had a symbiotic relationship with plants but not much with animals of any sort. Animal control and management, from the pest to the squirrel and bird and beyond level, was entirely under their male counterparts, the satyrs. Those lecherous half goats weren't much brighter then the nymphs, but they played their songs on their flutes, did their dances, ate leaves and grasses, and, of course, made it with the nymphs. If there was a need for any reason, that was the way you got new satyrs. Nymphs didn't reproduce that way — they budded. That's why they all looked and sounded and thought so much alike.