There is a moment, early in Oldie, when Benjamin of the Beasts drops out of the conversation entirely and you realize — not immediately, but a beat later — that he has become a wolf. Not dramatically. Not as a statement. He simply stopped being a boy in the middle of a sentence and became something with better senses for the task at hand.
This is Benjamin. The transition between forms is not an event for him. It is a decision, like choosing which hand to use.
He is the Dreamer of the Wood — the Dream of growth, of the deep biological intelligence of living systems, of the long ecological patience of a forest that existed before you and will exist after. He is also the youngest of the Dreamers in spirit, the most directly and uncomplicatedly himself, and — if something threatens what he loves — the most dangerous.
The land and the boy
Benjamin’s emotional state and the health of the Redwoods are the same thing. This is not a metaphor.
When he is in balance, the forest breathes. When he is frightened or lost or in pain, the Blight advances — a mindless, corrupting force that eats at the edges of the Wildwood, spreading through the trees the way a fever spreads through a body. The forest is not a symbol of Benjamin’s inner life. It is his inner life, expressed at ecosystem scale.
This gives his emotional experience a weight that would be paralyzing if he thought about it too much. He mostly doesn’t. He is working on this.
He is close to Holder Stone — who treats him with the specific, calibrated patience of someone who has watched a thousand years of people learning to carry the weight of what they are. He is close to Sailorboy, in the way two people become close who are both, at bottom, extremely sincere in a world that keeps trying to talk them out of it. He is distrustful of Maeve and Thomas in the ways the most honest person in a room is always a little distrustful of the most magnificent and the most charming.
He is sympathetic toward Queene Death in ways neither of them has fully articulated. This is probably fine.
What he can do
He can speak to animals — not in the metaphorical sense of someone who is good with animals, but in the direct, practical sense of having conversations with them. He can become them. Wolf, bearcub, sparrowhawk. He learns new shapes as he grows, and each one gives him something the others don’t.
He is the Prince of Trees. The Redwoods respond to him the way the sea responds to Sailorboy: not as a tool, but as a relationship.
The Burning Springs of Santana gave him a new form: a white lion-dragon with stripes of deep blue, about the size of a bear, with wings and whirling cobalt eyes. He slammed back into his human shape after a single pass through the sky and announced that he liked it here. This is Benjamin: catastrophically powerful, completely uncomplicated about it.
What he’s becoming
There are those who believe he will become the King in Green. There are those who believe he will become something larger than that — something that stops being a person and becomes a principle.
Benjamin, if you asked him, would say he just wants everyone to be okay.
He means it completely. He always does.