D is for dryad

This is the sort of picture you get when my four-year-old is helping me draw. In case you can't tell, she's a dryad. She's a sexy oak tree spirit from Greek mythology. Found in the Chronicles of Narnia, the Belgariad, and classic poetry like Milton's Paradise Lost, dryads are all over the place in literature. They were harder to catch in the myths, though. Fleet and lovely, dryads would protect their trees with ferocity. Oh, and a handful married into the human world. Eurydice, the wife of Orpheus, was a dryad.  Killed by a snake on the day of their wedding, she proved that dryads are not immortal, and that it's sad if their husband has to chase them to the underworld and fails to follow directions (don't look back!). Dryads could survive the death of their trees, but they still liked forests, and they had sister Hamadryads who would die with their trees, so the Greeks were supposed to be careful in their forests...