The wind never stopped asking it to fall. Not once, not for a season, not for all the centuries anyone has bothered to count.
Most of the tree gave the only answer it could, died back, bleached pale, twisted into whatever shape the wind demanded rather than fight it directly. That was never surrender. That was strategy. And somewhere in the middle of all that patient refusal, one small green branch is still saying no in the only language it knows: growing.
The mountains behind it are younger than they look. The tree is older than it looks. Between the two of them, the sky has nowhere left to be impressed.