Chapter Two: The Towering Tree
The silhouette became a shape only when he entered ground that was not the city's heart but its throat. The buildings fell away, revealing a wide plaza whose paving had been buckled by something enormous. Roots, in the beginning, looked like veins threading the earth; then they became limbs, and then they were the size of houses, heaving beneath the stone. The thing that towered above — he could no longer call it simply a tree — rose like a mountain that had decided to grow.
Up close its bark was not bark but a thousand overlapping scales, dark as wet coal and iridescent with a faint oil-sheen that drank the moonlight. When the rain hit it the drops slid off and vanished, as if the trunk swallowed weather. Its roots braided through and around the plaza's ruins, lifting fountains and porches like toys. Tendrils spread from them, quivering, and in the gaps between the roots he saw things he did not want to: doors half-open to darkness, a child's sock hooked on a knob, a carved bench split down the middle.
He stopped at the edge of where the roots made a ring. The air changed there — heavier, electric. The rain felt colder, the light from the hollow moon a brittle coin. He moved forward again, toward the first of the tendrils, compelled by a hope that was less hope than habit: the human reflex to seek other humans, to press against a problem and demand answers.
It was only as he drew nearer that he understood the silhouettes hanging from the branches. At a distance they had been shadows, perhaps flags, perhaps fabric caught in wind. Up close they were human forms suspended from the higher arms, splayed like offerings, swaying with a motion slow enough to be obscene. Tendrils of root had braided into limbs at points, as if to steady them, and thinner filaments threaded into necks and thumbs; mouths hung slack, eyes open in an eternal, blank astonishment. Dust motes turned in that space like small planets, and the sound of their sway was the only thing that broke the tree's oppressive hush.
He moved closer and hope, a thing that had trailed him like a thin cloth, unraveled. Their faces were hollowed, the skin a waxed gray. The rain left dark trails down their cheeks but could not wash the pallor from their lips. One figure had a child's shoe still tied; another wore a ring that flashed when the moon struck it. He nearly sobbed at the stupid detail of the ring, at its insistence on private stories amidst sacrament. Each body was empty in a way that had nothing to do with breath; their insides, where life used to sit thick and noisy, seemed to have been stripped to silence.
He stumbled backward and his knee hit a root. The pain was immediate and blessedly mundane. He pressed his hand to the wound as if that would anchor him, and for a moment the crowd of questions compressed into a single, physical sensation. He laughed then, a short bark that had no humor in it, because laughter was a shape of recognition, and recognition meant something remained to be recognized.
He tried to touch one of the suspended figures and his fingers met cold fabric and dust. The body yielded like a puppet with its strings cut. There was no movement, no residue of life that he could fetch from the skin. He ran his fingers across a cheek and the skin flaked like ash. He tasted ash on his lips and felt childish and monstrous at once.
Around him the tree's branches moved in a way that suggested breath. It was impossible to tell whether the movement was wind or intention. A single tendril uncoiled slowly, not toward him but toward a lower branch where another body hung, and in that slow uncoiling there was an animal logic, a ritual that felt older than cities. He realized with a kind of sick certainty that the tree had not been a passive witness to whatever had happened here; it was an agent, and the suspended shapes were not trophies but instruments.
Fear lodged itself behind his teeth and grew precise. He was alone in the sense that mattered: alone in choice. No hand reached for his. No voice explained. The city's secret, if such a thing existed, was not going to be given freely.
Yet he could not tear his eyes away. Terror and fascination braided together until his limbs felt heavy from them. The moon made the rain look like strings, and the rain hid things. He crept closer to where one of the nearer bodies hung and found at its throat a shallow incision, a neatness to the hole that hurt because of its intention. Around the ring finger of another was the imprint of a ring still warm with rust — recent, intimate, human.
Something inside him ached in a way that demanded a name. He had no name to offer, but he had memory-echoes: how a palm fits a ring, how a voice can be a map. Those small domestic facts now felt like relics from another man's religion. They made him ache with longing for the missing scaffolding of his self.
He sat down on a root, legs cramping, and pressed his forehead to his knees. Cold rain drummed the top of his skull. The silence found him praying in its own way: not for salvation, but for a map. If he could not be somebody, perhaps he could at least figure out where he was. If only to begin unfurling the tangle that had been woven through his life.
Around him the tree stood, monumental and patient, a dark liturgy against the red sky. It was beautiful in a way that made his stomach turn: terrible, precise, mythic. He imagined pilgrims kneeling beneath it, imagined it as an altar in a world where gods ate cities and left their bones to make room for new shrines. Whatever meaning the tree held, it would be found through work and pain, not through the sudden arrival of a name.
He closed his eyes and felt the rain as a slow, honest thing. In the dark behind his lids he let himself feel the smallness of being nameless, and with that he allowed a different motion to begin: to stand, to move, to piece together. Not yet hope, not yet conviction — just the steady, stubborn motion of a man assembling himself by the touch of ruins.
When he rose his knees trembled, but he was more like a person than he had been when the sky first split him open. The tree kept its silence, and the bodies kept their sway. The rain made everything slick and truthful. He took a step into the circle of roots and, for the first time in hours, let a single aim take the lead: find the trunk. See what waits at the center of that monstrous tree, and if there was an answer to be found, begin there.