Chapter Three: The Seed of Truth
He sat with his back against a root, rain washing the ash from his face, and watched the tree as if watching a slow accusation. The plaza hummed with a distant, patient sound he could not place; the suspended bodies swayed with the patience of things made for waiting. For a long time he said nothing at all.
Should I touch it?
What if it answers by killing me?
What if it does nothing and I leave with the same hollow that woke me?
The questions came and settled like birds on a wire—small, nervous, persistent. He tried to make himself reasonable. Walk away. Find the edge of the city. Find water that tasted like memory. But every route away blurred into the same blank horizon. Where would he go with no name? What map could he follow if none of the places in his head matched the shape of the city under that blood sky?
He rose, pacing a narrow circle until the ache in his knees matched the ache in his chest. Doubt built itself into tidy blocks—fear of the unknown, prudence, the sight of tendrils braided into wrists above him—but curiosity gnawed the mortar away. He told himself one valid thing, in the clear, small voice reserved for practical desperation: if this tree is the reason the city is emptied, then it might also be the place that explains why he is emptied. If answers lived anywhere, they would be here.
He stopped, set his palm against the trunk, and felt the bark like a trader's coin: slick, layered, and cold under the rain. The surface was not rough as he'd expected but ridged with scale-like plates that shimmered faintly under the moonlight. His fingertips slid on the living armor; the slime of sap made a slick track across his skin. For one fragile instant his childish revulsion to touch something so other was stronger than caution—then it melted into something sharper: awe.
The scales did not resist. They yielded with the patient smoothness of a thing that has learned how to accept hands without being surprised. His fear, which had pulsed like an animal beneath his ribs, thinned and folded into that awe as if a seam had been opened in him. The tree seemed immovable, a column carved from night, and yet by the feel of its skin his body read it as intimate, like the smooth side of a palm.
He pressed further, more of his palm against the trunk. The chill went through him—an almost electrical cold that licked at bone. The air around the tree grew inexplicably still; leaves above hung motionless even though the plaza's wind tried to stroke them. It was the kind of stillness that registers not as quiet but as attention—an attention that made the hair along his arms stand at ease and at warning.
Then the pull.
Not a yank but a subtler, surgical motion: a drawing of pressure from the rim of his senses inward, as if the trunk inhaled him through his fingertips. His vision narrowed; the world thinned to the texture beneath his hand and the pulse that moved under it. He felt his consciousness unclip, as if a seam had been undone, and he slid—not down a tunnel exactly but through layered pages of the tree's interior thinking.
Inside the wood the travel was not mere motion but translation. He did not float so much as translate into image and touch. Market mornings unfurled like worn cloth: calls of vendors, the slap of bread on stone, a child's bright laugh folded into the scent of frying. He felt the quick, hot intake of breath before a name is said and the peculiar looseness of a man whose hand was on a coin without knowing why he cared. The memories were intimate and mundane—the domestic scaffolding of lives—then refracted and reconstituted by the tree's mind until they became a mosaic of small things made vast.
Fear became a register of bodily notes. He counted them the way one counts stitches: pulse jumping, copper on the tongue, knees that wanted to buckle but obeyed. He felt foolish at his terror. Who fears a tree? And yet the thing holding him was older than the city, older than the language for fear, with an appetite that respected not the brute of flesh but the delicate seam of private life.
The channels inside the trunk were braided like rivers in a stone map. Light traveled in veins—sickly, green-blue—making the inner wood look like the belly of some giant, sleeping fish. The smell inside was layered: wet earth, old ink, the metallic clean of a ledger closed after long account. As he moved deeper, the chorus of voices coalesced into a single hum—a low, thrumming chorus like a heart learned through centuries. It was sinister and tender at once: a registry of thousands of small intimacies stitched into rhythm.
Occasionally an image struck him so precisely it felt as if someone had reached into his chest and touched the object that proved him human: a woman lighting a stove, the way she blew on the flame and frowned; a child reluctant to share a toy; a pair of hands smoothing a bedspread with ritual patience. These were not great events. They were the tiny, habitual acts that make up a life. The tree kept them like an archivist keeps letters: folded carefully, catalogued by whisper and tone.
The inner passage did not have a timeline a human mind recognized. Centuries cooled into seconds; lullabies overlapped funeral hymns. He felt at once overwhelmed and very, very small—like a man reading the margins of a book that had written him in indeterminate ink. Each memory he passed was a small theft and a small gift: the city's loneliness turned into nourishment for the central thing.
At last the corridors opened into a cathedral of wood. The chamber's vault arched with ribs that pulsed faintly, casting a blue-black glow across everything. The hum concentrated into a single tone so clear it felt like the world humming in a key he had never been taught to hear. He stood—if standing is the right word for the posture of a mind in such a place—and felt the chamber's pulse sync with his own.
In the center, cradled like an altar's miracle, hung one Seed.
It was the size of a palm and so pale the colour seemed reluctant to be called white; beneath its skin a dark green web crawled like a map of veins. It dangled from a single, dark tendril with a bluish sheen, which coiled from a blossom shaped like a blackened chalice—petals the shade of bruised midnight, edges trimming with a whisper of blue. The petals shivered in the chamber's light, pulsing in time with the Seed's slow heartbeat.
Up close the Seed felt impossibly intimate. When he drew closer the air seemed to thin and focus; the hum bent around it like a congregation. There was something in its quiet that promised revelation. Not the bluntness of answers, but the precise unspooling of what he was—name, small rituals, the particular accent of a laugh he could not yet claim. The Seed did not shout truth. It offered it like breath: close, invasive, undoing.
He reached as if to touch a coin dropped into the palm of a sleeping god. The pull that had first taken him through the wood narrowed into a single, gravitational line toward that pale kernel. It felt as if the Seed could not merely tell him who he was but could pry the seam of him open, set the private closets of his life out on a table and ask him to choose what he would keep.
His hand trembled. The heart in his chest wanted retreat, but something older than curiosity, a hunger for coherence in a mind that had been hollowed, moved his fingers forward. He could name the risk: a trade of small, intimate things he had yet to value. He could name the hope: that a single thread, once found, might pull the rest into pattern.
He paused, palm an inch from that pale surface, feeling the coolness like the breath from a cavern. Around him the chamber thrummed, patient as a law. He thought of the bodies outside, of the child's shoe caught in a root, of the city that had become ledger and altar. He thought of every small, private thing that made a person human.
Should I touch it?
Could a name be worth the quiet theft of some other small worship?
What would I barter to feel whole again?
His fingers brushed the Seed.
The hum answered like a chorus exhaled. The world tilted. The Seed's pulse matched his own, and for a single, terrible, exquisite moment he felt whole and naked and known.