Chapter Four — Liturgy of Roots
He touched the Seed like a man touching the blade of a truth he'd long suspected existed.
It yielded to his fingers with a soft, unbelieving give — not the tear of fruit from a twig but the quiet unfastening of something patient. The blossom's blue-black petals recoiled; their bluish sheen faltered and died from the edges inward. Where they curled back the color turned to ash and fell in a slow rain that smelled of iron and old paper. He watched the petal-dust fall with a stupid, human caution, part expecting the world to end and part convinced nothing at all would happen.
The Seed sat in his palm like an accusation. It filled his hand the way a palm-sized stone fills a palm — solid, unnervingly heavy for something that looked fragile. Its whiteness was an inhuman light from within, yet the surface refused to be simply smooth: under the glaze he felt a worked texture, ridges and micro-scars like weathered wood polished over generations. He ran a thumb along the arc and the contradiction set his teeth on edge — perfection and craft braided in one object.
Why does it feel like this?
What am I supposed to do now?
He held it up to the dim light and the Seed glowed with a visceral whiteness that seemed to push against the ruin around them, as if the object carried its own small horizon. His fingers felt no warmth, no pulse, no welcome; it was as if he cradled a hollow that shone. He turned it over and over, mapping the roughness with fingertips, cataloguing the pits where light snagged. The Seed's hardness suggested a long making; its sheen suggested ritual.
A blunt, human question lodged in his throat: should I eat it? The thought sounded absurd the moment it formed, and yet it carried the logic of someone who has lost a map. If the Seed could unthread the fog in him, if swallowing it could return a name or the tilt of a face at breakfast, why not? Would swallowing be communion or surrender? What would he trade for one clear memory?
Other, surer fears crowded in: what if it's poison? What if by taking this he forfeits the last small thing that still belonged to him? Could he remain himself after such an act? The questions steadied him only a little; hunger for identification braided with fear, and the fear did not entirely win.
Around him the plaza pressed with its ruined intimacies: a child's shoe caught in a root, a ring dulled by rain, a photograph faded where a face had been. The Seed's inner light made the square look paler, as though the world had been measured by contrast. Unease pooled in him: if this object could bring him back, might it also empty another? If he reached into himself, what would be taken in return?
Curiosity, as it always did, outweighed restraint. He traced the Seed's contradictions again and, as if testing gravity, returned it to the cupped cradle of the blossom.
For a long breath nothing happened. The flower's petals closed like a lid. The fallen dust settled. He stood, shoulders folding with the disappointment of someone who had expected an answer and found silence. Is that it? Did I just wake the wrong thing? Where do I go from here if this was nothing?
Then the Seed reacted.
Light flared at its core, a white so pure it felt less like illumination and more like revelation. The plaza's shadows flattened; the rain became inked lines on a page. The brightness was not merely visual; it registered in bone and tooth, a pressure that made his mouth feel full of light. An old, steady terror rose — not the scatter of panic but the clear recognition of standing at the lip of something much larger than fear itself.
He staggered as brightness unfolded and the plaza dissolved into fog.
Fog swallowed sound. It rolled in thick, luminous sheets until his breath showed white and every ordinary noise was muffled to the rhythm of his lungs. Wonder came first — a childlike opening to a world that felt stitched from half-remembered streets. The fog shaped alleys he almost knew, walls he might once have traced, steam rising from a pot he might have stirred. For a moment he felt astonishment: why am I here? Whose memory is this?
That astonishment curdled. A pull seized him, not external but internal, a downward tug that compressed his will as if he were being threaded onto a narrower spindle of attention. Thought thickened; speech lodged. Panic thudded like a trapped animal against the ribs of his resolve. He was not falling so much as being folded, and every attempt to resist met the patient certainty of whatever force was at work.
He fought with small, familiar tools: pinning an image as anchor, naming sensations to keep them real. The force had the certainty of law. Fear mapped into the soles of his feet and into the metallic taste at the back of his tongue. He lifted his gaze through the mist and the sky broke open.
From the bright expanse above descended the Tree — not the single trunk he had leaned upon but a colossal presence unmoored from heaven. It fell with slow, tectonic dignity; roots unspooled like the cords of a god. The air itself seemed to bend around the fall; clouds shredded into lines as the canopy cleaved the bright expanse. The descent felt sacramental, as if the very geometry of the world were being rewritten by root and shadow. He wanted to run; his legs obeyed him no more than a man can unlearn the way he breathes.
Above that falling trunk hung seven halos: discs of light so fierce they made the sun look ordinary. Their radiance was not warmth but decree — a cold, inhuman clarity that read like judgment. They hovered in ordered rings, each a perfect, burning rim that cut the sky into new law. Their glare did not merely illuminate; it announced. The whole city, already ruined and hollowed, was wrapped in the halos' growing heat and glare; bricks steamed, banners smoldered, the rain hissed as if burned on contact. The halos' light moved like a tide, swallowing alleys and turning familiar streets into the pages of a sacred book scorched at the edges.
The halos' terror was not a scream but a proclamation: the world had been taken into account. With a monumental pulse they declared the city changed. Light struck and the inhabitants were lifted: bodies rose and hung suspended in a plane of bleaching radiance. Faces blurred and then hardened into blankness; terror traveled through the city like a current and pooled at his feet. Tendrils — long, black, surgical — sprang from the Tree's open belly, threading into wrists and chests with a meticulous, chilling care. They anchored the lifted bodies to the descending roots and drew at something invisible inside them.
The harvest that followed was precise and devastating. The small rhythms that made a life — the way one laughed, the sound of a name, the habit of waking with a certain sigh — were taken with the efficiency of someone who knows exactly what they need. Resistance crumpled. People became shells, the private scaffolding of a person stripped clean. Horror lodged in him like a stone: if this is what the Tree does, what did his act of plucking set in motion?
The city itself seemed to answer: flame laced the edges of streets; smoke gathered into slow, coiling figures that crawled along the ground; the very air tasted of something older than ruin. The halos did not simply light the world — they embraced it, a burning coronation that turned houses into altars and made every shadow a scripture. Heat rose in walls; windows wept molten glass. Even from where he stood, clutching the Seed, he felt the sweep of a cataclysm that was ritual and execution at once.
He stood in the fog, the Seed small and brilliant in his palm, and for an instant his eyes caught a glimpse of something so alien and forbidden it tore at the edge of perception. The sight hit him like a blow; his mind shuddered. For a single, razor-precise moment his consciousness frayed and he felt himself tethered on the brink of a terrible undoing — a creeping corruption at the thin places of thought