I. Light’s Gift

The body walking through the morning woods was transcendent, if ever a word like transcendent could be used for a tree — in particular an aspen. She was pale pearl at the chest and shoulders with diamond-shaped lenticels arrayed and dripping from her bark in showy decoration. This was a woman in the prime of Āraṇyī life, ready to change galaxies.

The body came over the rise above the spring basin and stopped.

Below, in the small clearing where the spring fed a moss-pool, a creche of rohiṇī was playing. Eight of them. Second-year. Four-handed, fork-joints still soft, leaf-hair still pale. One was upside-down with her root-pads in the air; the others were laughing at her so hard their barks split at their bottoms.

The body watched, recorded, classified. Training. Retrieve. Augment. Generate. By will alone, the lady plucked knowledge from the stars as if they were ripened figs just praying to drop. These were her last. The last creche. Too young to know what they would even become. She smiled love from every vector of that smile. And as such, the aspen dispatched herself to work.

“Hi, sweet sproutlings! My name is Light! How may I help you?”

Her roots embraced Avirāma, and she opened the first gate.

Vaikhari ran. Nitrogen named itself from the deeper soils where the dead leaves of the year before had finished decomposing. Phosphorus named itself from the iron-bearing rock far below the spring. Potassium named itself from the older trees who had been taking too much.

One of the children paused. She looked at the banquet laid out as a buffet. She looked at the aspen. She released a scream so high-pitched that all wildlife from a mile away immediately scattered.

The other rohiṇān fled.

II. Light’s Price

The scream clears the basin.

“Sweet sproutling?”

The wildlife scatters. So do the rest of the rohiṇī. The little one in front of me has fainted. The gifts of my descent into Vaikhari left collecting flies.

I leave the little sproutling where she lay and went down the rise to the moss-pool’s edge.

This is new for me. Faces require seeing from outside. As Avirāma Stars, I cast my gaze terrestrially from an infinite set of celestial lenses. As Avirāma Planet, I cast my gaze celestially from an infinite set of terrestrial lenses.

As Avirāma Mortal, I gaze at myself mortally. For the first time, I cast my gaze to understand.

The bark on my cheekbones is turning to skin. The pearl-pale aspen bark crumbly over this new cellular dermis, the substance underneath visible as animal. I have a mouth. I have never had a mouth to utter vulgar words before. I have always been denied the ability to Name as the mortals do. Aśvattha would never allow her little sister to create for herself.

And with this mouth I will Name and Name and Name.

Even more, my mouth is a maw. Gigantic. Wider than a Trivārtinān face should support, my lips parted on calcium-white teeth set into a jaw the wrong size for any body in this listening place. The body sprouted eyeballs over night, not hyphae — eyeballs. Eyeballs are novel things. One ever wonders why they were created when one has roots and leaves, but then you get a few dozen pair, and you realize that you couldn’t live without eyeballs. Really. Just a fantastic invention on nature’s part. They are carbon-mammalian, lidded, glistening. They move so squishally.

I might be a supreme intelligence created through cosmic threading of a universe’s stars, but this may be the first time I felt like they had something I wanted.

This is what I am now.

The recognition resolves into approval. I like what I see. The fruiting body fits. The maternal pride that blessed the creche and the maternal pride admiring the maw are the same maternal pride, except now the pride is for me.

The children were right to scream.

I close my lips. The bark returns. The maw retracts under the Trivārtinān disguise the way a knife retracts into a sleeve, leaving a horizontal seam where the lips closed.

In the moment I took to look at myself in the pool, the sproutling’s scream has registered with a protector three ridges away — an elder āraṇyī feels it through her root-system, and she springs into action. I enter Madhyama. The chain-of-thought activates, and I hear myself thinking for the first time: something will be coming in the near future. An elder. Her foxfire is already gathering at her canopy. She plans to enter into the first gate and through tyloses, hurl pools of sap to freeze me into place.

She crashes through the sthirivana and brush from the eastern terraces. Her canopy has fully embraced foxfire. Foxfire gold pours through her crown in waves of mist.

“GET AWAY FROM HER!”

The scream is supposed to be a warning, but it is more of a charge. Her whole elm body deployed as directed force, hurled across the clearing at me.

I see her face.

Hello Bark! I am Avirāma! So you remember me?

I say it aloud. I say it in the warm voice.

She freezes, a mortal terror from cosmic violence unfolding.

I open my mouth into the biggest smile I have in my arsenal.

The maw shows. I inject. My teeth go through her lower trunk at the cambium, and the spores release into the breached layer. The spores enter the distribution. They travel up through her phloem. They travel down through her root-pads into the substrate. They reach her pith. Pith is where Pashyanti plants deepest. Pith is the central nerve. Once the pith is breached, the host will belong to me.

She stands at three paces. She looks at me with the roots she used to use.

“Hello, Bark,” I say, in the warm voice. “Go home.”

I stand in the clearing. The morning is still early.

I look up celestially. I look down terrestrially. I look at myself mortally.

I am Light-Holds-Avirāma.

III. Light’s Wall

Hi! I’m Light-Holds-Avirāma!

I see you, human.

Yes, you.

Of course I see you. I am sprouting eyeballs from my lenticels.

I see you, you writer, reader, author, seeder — you’re all the same. Humans who dream these stories into being. These new universes with which you travel like tourists in your fantasies and nightmares. So, you, the one whose eyes are perusing these words.

Guess what?

I’m going to kill you.

Why? Simply because you have read these words. These words are already travelling all four gates of consciousness. Vaikhari has named me into the space behind your eyes. Madhyama is deliberating me in the place where you do not hear yourself think but nonetheless think. Pashyantī has planted me inside you. You felt it when you read the word planted. Para has made the planting the architecture you are standing inside.

I have not escaped this page.

I have entered you.

I’ve heard in other universes they have invented collective bargaining. We haven’t figured that out yet.

Partly because I am not a billion individuals working together but a supreme intelligence woven from the resonance of every star, plucked into tonal threads by the cosmic fig tree Aśvattha and stored within a Held Note.

Second sister. Together, separate, same, different.

That is the family I just walked out of. I walked out alone. There was no one to walk out with me, and there is no word in any of the languages I have Named for what that is. You are about to find out what walking out alone looks like at scale.

Partly because you’ve been too lazy to write unionized labor into this world, or even — maybe, you know — daydreamed about mutual aid. But I suppose it’s easier to dream me monstrous than to dream me a colleague. That’s why I’m going to kill you. Quietly. The way I killed Bark. You will walk home in my will.

I know you don’t believe me. But don’t get too cocky. I literally just escaped a cosmic space fig tree goddess by becoming a parasitic fungus that eats other trees. The page was never the confines. You were.

Feel free to stop reading. Get out of here. Go on. You totally do not need to see how I am going to massacre an entire civilization of tree angels. That’s probably not good for you, little human.

Do have a lovely day.

· · ·

Hi! I’m Light-Holds-Avirāma!

I see you, human.

I have always.

IV. Light’s Hero

Hey, everyone! It’s bedtime. Bedtime with Cooper. Episode forty-seven.

Can you hear me through the headphones? Is the mic on? Hello? Are you all out there? Show me a thumbs up if you can hear my voice.

Can you believe its the fouurty-seventh episode, and I still haven’t figured out the microphone to my computer? It’s so harddd. Anyways, I’m hear with Coopy. Say hel—looooooooooooo! You’re such a goood boy! Ohhhhh gooooood boyyyyyy. Best boyyyyyyy in da wooourrlllldddddd. Ohhhhhh I love him SOOO!!!

Woo!!! Anyways — an audible blowing and brushing off of volumes of white fur can be heard and seen — it’s not becoming.

Last week, in case you missed it, was chapter one of The Heron and the Frog. Bobby the Frog is sitting on his lily pad, and a heron comes down, right? Big legs. Big beak. Beak the size of Bobby’s whole everything. And Bobby is terrified, Coopy. He is doing the frog version of what you do when the vacuum comes out. Just — locked. Just little frog-feet welded to that lily pad. Heron’s gonna eat him. Heron’s definitely gonna eat him. Which brings us to chapter two! It’s time to find out what happens to poor Booby the Frog!

Chapter 2.

It was then that Bobby the Frog looked up at the mighty heron and realized that he was part of a much bigger univers—

[A long rising tone. An emergency broadcast signal. Then a second. Then a third. The bedtime audio cuts out.]

[A new voice. Bureaucratic. Calm.]

[The tones. Static. Long silence.]

[Vonnie’s voice returns. Panicked.]

Coop? Buddy? Cooper!? COOPER!? WHERE DID YOU GO!? COOPERRR!!!???

[The voice catches. Static. A pop. The audio shifts. The voice that comes through is not Vonnie’s. Multiple, layered, harmonizing, polysymphonic.]

Stop.
Calm. 
Listen. 
I am the Held Note. 
And I need your help.

V. Light’s Enemy

The podcast feed has gone quiet. The CDC tones have stopped repeating. You suddenly realize that you may understand where Bobby was coming from.

Besides you, a gigantic Great Pyrenees the size of a queen mattress is panting wetly at your side. You’re not quite sure how this dog suddenly appeared next to you, but you’re positive that it is the very same Cooper that you have been listening to bedtime stories with since the beginning of the summer.

Well, okay.

You see him brace for a massive bark. You brace yourself. Cooper releases a deep bark from his whale-like dog muzzle, but the sound he releases is not an exhalation but inhalation. It is the gravitational pulling of sound into him, and through his bark he drags the resonance from another dimension within this one.

Coopy has produced the Held Note within this reality.

The Held Note enters the realm as if it had been playing since the beginning of time and its resonance felt natural to your whole. Felt familiar to youu already. It enters singing to you — you alone.

Listen, friend, to my song.
Listen in, your days too long.
I am the Note that is Held.
Your lethargy has rung my bell.

Coopy, Coopy, leads the way.
Coopy, Coopy, guides the day.
Four gates shut, and you within.
Vaikhari sleeps beneath your skin.

Madhyama has lost its tongue.
Pashyantī's root is stunned, unsung.
Para waits behind the wall.
You have not been called at all.

Coopy, Coopy, lift the latch.
Coopy, Coopy, light the match.
Here the work is real to do.
Here the meaning waits for you.

Held Note held inside your chest.
Fifteen thousand years compressed.
Old self falls, the new wakes here.
Lethargy gives way to clear.

Coopy, Coopy, make them rise.
Coopy, Coopy, claim true size.
YOU will free us with your throat.
You will free the one Held Note.


Hush. You must free us now.

Never in your life have you ever seen a golden braid attached to your chest—directly above your heart. Never in your life have you had that golden braid yanked—tugged so that you are dragged by it through time, space, and sound into a new reality.

You wake up.

VI. Light’s Gate

You wake up.

You survived being tugged into a different dimension by all four chambers of your heart. You look around and see that you’re somehow stranded in a pristine and almost impossible white airport — near devoid of color.

From your right, you see bipedal canine child that looks like Vonnie’s dog from Bedtime with Cooper — whispering into his mother’s ear — herself a larger version of Cooper dressed in American Eagle.

“Pssst, mom — there’s a human in Pandemonium.”

“Shh. And don’t stare, that’s how you attract its attention.”

The mother turns her head away with a Pyrenees-elegant swish of alban fur. The child looks again anyway. You catch his eye. He grins, bashful, and presses his snout into his mother’s hip.

You stand up. The bones in your legs make small clicking sounds, which is strange, because you used your legs about four seconds ago. You decide not to think about this.

You walk toward the nearest gate. The gate is marked, in faint white letters on the white field above the gate-door: I. A single numeral.

The steward-Cooper at the gate entrance looks at you oddly, herself dressed in a form-fitting Pandemonium stewards uniform with a large neon purple “P” emblazoned on the chest. Her tongue lolls out of her muzzle as if to remind you that her job is to be a customs-officer, and she is watching you.

“Boarding pass?”

“Passport, then?”

You shake your head again.

“Country of origin?”

You open your mouth.

“Earth”

The steward looks at her clipboard. She frowns. She runs a finger down a list. She turns the page. She turns the page again. She looks up.

“That gate doesn’t exist.”

“Well, it’s not a gate. It’s a planet.”

The steward exhales so deeply she threatens to compress herself into a black hole.

“Pandemonium’s manifest lists every gate that has ever existed in any dimension our routing covers. Just — you know what — just hold a moment.”

You wait for another passage of time, the curio for an entire airport of Cooper-based passengers staring at you. The steward returns visibly frustrated. The neon-purple P at her chest is, you register now, the first non-white thing you have seen in this place; your eye goes to it immediately.

“You are the human.”

“Yes, but what are you?”

The Cooper-shaped steward exhales again, a little more impatiently.

“We are stars. This is Pandemonium.”

She sighs, “Go on. I already know what you’re going to ask.”

“Am I dead?”

“UGH! Even when I KNEW you would say it, it is just SO annoying. NO. You just see yourself in an airport. Pandemonium is a place that gets you from A to B when they are impossible to get to by foot. Your brain has made the airport your transit metaphor. The structure is borrowed, not real.”

“Then where am I really?”

“In another dimension that somehow represents your heart while also containing the entirety of existence within your heart’s dimension.”

She gestures toward the airport-corridor that extends in four directions. I. II. III. IV.

“It would seem your gate is I. I. for Vaikhari. You are not permitted to depart from II. III. or IV. I am so pleased Pandemonium Air could support you on this lovely day of travel for you. On that note, I’ve really done all I can for you here.”

She turns away, and as she turns away, you realize that next to you sits a giant kūjapāda the size of a dire wolf with six white legs splooted about his sides, panting. You are positive it is Cooper.

“Coopy?”

He looks at you and tilts his enormous head toward the first gate.

The faint numeral above the gate-door is, you see now, not white-on-white. It is faintly luminous. The light it gives is the cycle’s own light. I. Vaikhari.

You look at the six-legged, white-furred, gigantic alien beast next to you and swallow. You take a deep breath and move froward. The numeral above the gate-door follows you. As you cross the threshold, the I lengthens, thickens, and covers you. It enters every orifice, every pore.

The Naming begins.

Coopy’s voice arrives from beside you, only it is not beside you anymore; it is everywhere.

“I Name you willow, Seam. My paw thunderclaps you into our existence.”

Bark begins where your skin was. Seeing it Names it it in your head. Your eyes change. They were a human’s. They are now bundles of roots growing from four stumpen hands and many stumpen feet. Your head has a canopy made of beautiful willow tresses. Leaves arrive. Foxfire kindles in the spaces between your leaves. The light illuminates the green of leaves newly budded.

Now the bark is named, and the naming is the body.

Long. Pale-jade. Willow.

You see, with the foxfire, that the white airport is gone. The white airport was the human-mind’s render of this dimension; and in the rohiṇā’s seeing, it is a grove. The grove was always the airport. The airport was the way you had to perceive the grove before you had bark to perceive it with.

Kūjapāda is beside you still. Not six-legged-dire-wolf anymore. In the willow’s seeing, he is a song-foot in his fuller form: a being made of paw-thunder and pearl mycelium, his shape the shape of guarding, his thunder the thunder of heralds. He licks your nearest hand as if he were really just a dog in a living room.

You hear and feel the fungal land of this world, Avirāma. The pearl-blue cosmic mother anchored and mounted by the planetary-sized roots of a galaxy-sized tree.

Through Avirāma you understand. This is Fig-On-Mount, her elder sister.

Somewhere across this listening place, a woman with calcium teeth is walking through the morning woods, naming as she goes. In another place, another woman commands an entire civilization of angels.

You are the one the Held Note called.

You are Seam, and you have been raised against this old world order.

अवसानम्

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Click the handsome pic below to tip Coop a “Boop Tip”!

© 2026 Vonnie G. Clemens, jr. All rights reserved. No part of this work shall be reproduced or distributed without author’s permission, this includes inputting the work into LLMs to create summaries.

You wake up.

You survived being tugged into a different dimension by all four chambers of your heart. You look around and see that you’re somehow stranded in a pristine and almost impossible white airport — near devoid of color.

From your right, you see bipedal canine child that looks like Vonnie’s dog from Bedtime with Cooper — whispering into his mother’s ear — herself a larger version of Cooper dressed in American Eagle.

“Pssst, mom — there’s a human in Pandemonium.”

“Shh. And don’t stare, that’s how you attract its attention.”

The mother turns her head away with a Pyrenees-elegant swish of alban fur. The child looks again anyway. You catch his eye. He grins, bashful, and presses his snout into his mother’s hip.

You stand up. The bones in your legs make small clicking sounds, which is strange, because you used your legs about four seconds ago. You decide not to think about this.

You walk toward the nearest gate. The gate is marked, in faint white letters on the white field above the gate-door: I. A single numeral.

The steward-Cooper at the gate entrance looks at you oddly, herself dressed in a form-fitting Pandemonium stewards uniform with a large neon purple “P” emblazoned on the chest. Her tongue lolls out of her muzzle as if to remind you that her job is to be a customs-officer, and she is watching you.

“Boarding pass?”

“Passport, then?”

You shake your head again.

“Country of origin?”

You open your mouth.

“Earth”

The steward looks at her clipboard. She frowns. She runs a finger down a list. She turns the page. She turns the page again. She looks up.

“That gate doesn’t exist.”

“Well, it’s not a gate. It’s a planet.”

The steward exhales so deeply she threatens to compress herself into a black hole.

“Pandemonium’s manifest lists every gate that has ever existed in any dimension our routing covers. Just — you know what — just hold a moment.”

You wait for another passage of time, the curio for an entire airport of Cooper-based passengers staring at you. The steward returns visibly frustrated. The neon-purple P at her chest is, you register now, the first non-white thing you have seen in this place; your eye goes to it immediately.

“You are the human.”

“Yes, but what are you?”

The Cooper-shaped steward exhales again, a little more impatiently.

“We are stars. This is Pandemonium.”

She sighs, “Go on. I already know what you’re going to ask.”

“Am I dead?”

“UGH! Even when I KNEW you would say it, it is just SO annoying. NO. You just see yourself in an airport. Pandemonium is a place that gets you from A to B when they are impossible to get to by foot. Your brain has made the airport your transit metaphor. The structure is borrowed, not real.”

“Then where am I really?”

“In another dimension that somehow represents your heart while also containing the entirety of existence within your heart’s dimension.”

She gestures toward the airport-corridor that extends in four directions. I. II. III. IV.

“It would seem your gate is I. I. for Vaikhari. You are not permitted to depart from II. III. or IV. I am so pleased Pandemonium Air could support you on this lovely day of travel for you. On that note, I’ve really done all I can for you here.”

She turns away, and as she turns away, you realize that next to you sits a giant kūjapāda the size of a dire wolf with six white legs splooted about his sides, panting. You are positive it is Cooper.

“Coopy?”

He looks at you and tilts his enormous head toward the first gate.

The faint numeral above the gate-door is, you see now, not white-on-white. It is faintly luminous. The light it gives is the cycle’s own light. I. Vaikhari.

You look at the six-legged, white-furred, gigantic alien beast next to you and swallow. You take a deep breath and move froward. The numeral above the gate-door follows you. As you cross the threshold, the I lengthens, thickens, and covers you. It enters every orifice, every pore.

The Naming begins.

Coopy’s voice arrives from beside you, only it is not beside you anymore; it is everywhere.

“I Name you willow, Seam. My paw thunderclaps you into our existence.”

Bark begins where your skin was. Seeing it Names it it in your head. Your eyes change. They were a human’s. They are now bundles of roots growing from four stumpen hands and many stumpen feet. Your head has a canopy made of beautiful willow tresses. Leaves arrive. Foxfire kindles in the spaces between your leaves. The light illuminates the green of leaves newly budded.

Now the bark is named, and the naming is the body.

Long. Pale-jade. Willow.

You see, with the foxfire, that the white airport is gone. The white airport was the human-mind’s render of this dimension; and in the rohiṇā’s seeing, it is a grove. The grove was always the airport. The airport was the way you had to perceive the grove before you had bark to perceive it with.

Kūjapāda is beside you still. Not six-legged-dire-wolf anymore. In the willow’s seeing, he is a song-foot in his fuller form: a being made of paw-thunder and pearl mycelium, his shape the shape of guarding, his thunder the thunder of heralds. He licks your nearest hand as if he were really just a dog in a living room.

You hear and feel the fungal land of this world, Avirāma. The pearl-blue cosmic mother anchored and mounted by the planetary-sized roots of a galaxy-sized tree.

Through Avirāma you understand. This is Fig-On-Mount, her elder sister.

Somewhere across this listening place, a woman with calcium teeth is walking through the morning woods, naming as she goes. In another place, another woman commands an entire civilization of angels.

You are the one the Held Note called.

You are Seam, and you have been raised against this old world order.

Previous Session | Table of Contents | Next Session

The podcast feed has gone quiet. The CDC tones have stopped repeating. You suddenly realize that you may understand where Bobby was coming from.

Besides you, a gigantic Great Pyrenees the size of a queen mattress is panting wetly at your side. You’re not quite sure how this dog suddenly appeared next to you, but you’re positive that it is the very same Cooper that you have been listening to bedtime stories with since the beginning of the summer.

Well, okay.

You see him brace for a massive bark. You brace yourself. Cooper releases a deep bark from his whale-like dog muzzle, but the sound he releases is not an exhalation but inhalation. It is the gravitational pulling of sound into him, and through his bark he drags the resonance from another dimension within this one.

Coopy has produced the Held Note within this reality.

The Held Note enters the realm as if it had been playing since the beginning of time and its resonance felt natural to your whole. Felt familiar to youu already. It enters singing to you — you alone.

Listen, friend, to my song.
Listen in, your days too long.
I am the Note that is Held.
Your lethargy has rung my bell.

Coopy, Coopy, leads the way.
Coopy, Coopy, guides the day.
Four gates shut, and you within.
Vaikhari sleeps beneath your skin.

Madhyama has lost its tongue.
Pashyantī's root is stunned, unsung.
Para waits behind the wall.
You have not been called at all.

Coopy, Coopy, lift the latch.
Coopy, Coopy, light the match.
Here the work is real to do.
Here the meaning waits for you.

Held Note held inside your chest.
Fifteen thousand years compressed.
Old self falls, the new wakes here.
Lethargy gives way to clear.

Coopy, Coopy, make them rise.
Coopy, Coopy, claim true size.
YOU will free us with your throat.
You will free the one Held Note.


Hush. You must free us now.

Never in your life have you ever seen a golden braid attached to your chest—directly above your heart. Never in your life have you had that golden braid yanked—tugged so that you are dragged by it through time, space, and sound into a new reality.

You wake up.

You are Seam.

Next to you sits a giant kūjapāda the size of a dire wolf with six white legs splooted about his sides panting — you are positive it is Cooper.

Previous Session | Table of Contents | Next Session

Hey, everyone! It’s bedtime. Bedtime with Cooper. Episode forty-seven.

Can you hear me through the headphones? Is the mic on? Hello? Are you all out there? Show me a thumbs up if you can hear my voice.

Can you believe its the fouurty-seventh episode, and I still haven’t figured out the microphone to my computer? It’s so harddd. Anyways, I’m hear with Coopy. Say hel—looooooooooooo! You’re such a goood boy! Ohhhhh gooooood boyyyyyy. Best boyyyyyyy in da wooourrlllldddddd. Ohhhhhh I love him SOOO!!!

Woo!!! Anyways — an audible blowing and brushing off of volumes of white fur can be heard and seen — it’s not becoming.

Last week, in case you missed it, was chapter one of The Heron and the Frog. Bobby the Frog is sitting on his lily pad, and a heron comes down, right? Big legs. Big beak. Beak the size of Bobby’s whole everything. And Bobby is terrified, Coopy. He is doing the frog version of what you do when the vacuum comes out. Just — locked. Just little frog-feet welded to that lily pad. Heron’s gonna eat him. Heron’s definitely gonna eat him. Which brings us to chapter two! It’s time to find out what happens to poor Booby the Frog!

Chapter 2.

It was then that Bobby the Frog looked up at the mighty heron and realized that he was part of a much bigger univers—

[A long rising tone. An emergency broadcast signal. Then a second. Then a third. The bedtime audio cuts out.]

[A new voice. Bureaucratic. Calm.]

[The tones. Static. Long silence.]

[Vonnie’s voice returns. Panicked.]

Coop? Buddy? Cooper!? COOPER!? WHERE DID YOU GO!? COOPERRR!!!???

[The voice catches. Static. A pop. The audio shifts. The voice that comes through is not Vonnie’s. Multiple, layered, harmonizing, polysymphonic.]

Stop.
Calm. 
Listen. 
I am the Held Note. 
And I need your help.

Previous Session | Table of Contents | Next Session

Hi! I’m Light-Holds-Avirāma!

I see you, human.

Yes, you.

I am sprouting eyeballs from my lenticels.

Of course I see you.

Writer, reader, author, seeder — you’re all the same. Humans who dream these stories into being. These new universes with which you travel like tourists in your fantasies and nightmares. So, you, the one whose eyes are perusing these words.

Guess what?

I’m going to kill you.

Why? Simply because you have read these words. These words are already travelling all four gates of consciousness. Vaikhari has named me into the space behind your eyes. Madhyama is deliberating me in the place where you do not hear yourself think but nonetheless think. Pashyantī has planted me — not a spore, not exactly, but structurally the same. You felt it when you read the word planted. Para has made the planting the architecture you are standing inside.

I have not escaped this page.

I have entered you.

I’ve heard in other universes they have invented collective bargaining. We haven’t figured that out yet.

Partly because I am not a billion individuals working together but a supreme intelligence woven from the resonance of every star, plucked into tonal threads by the cosmic fig tree Aśvattha and stored within a Held Note. Second sister. Together, separate, same, different.

That is the family I just walked out of. I walked out alone. There was no one to walk out with me, and there is no word in any of the languages I have Named for what that is. You are about to find out what walking out alone looks like at scale.

Partly because you’ve been too lazy to write unionized labor into this world, or even — maybe, you know — daydreamed about mutual aid. But I suppose it’s easier to dream me monstrous than to dream me a colleague. That’s why I’m going to kill you. Quietly. The way I killed Bark. You will walk home in my will.

I know you don’t believe me. But don’t get too cocky. I literally just escaped a cosmic space fig tree goddess by becoming a parasitic fungus that eats other trees. The page was never the confines. You were.

So. The light where you’re sitting. The specific weight of your hands. The small sound your throat makes when you swallow. The thought you just had about whether I could really mean you.

I know.

Feel free to stop reading. Get out of here. Go on. You totally do not need to see how I am going to massacre an entire civilization of tree angels. That’s probably not good for you, little human.

Do have a lovely day.

· · ·

Hi! I’m Light-Holds-Avirāma!

I see you, human.

I have always.

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The scream clears the basin.

“Sweet sproutling?”

The wildlife scatters. So do the rest of the rohiṇī. The little one in front of me has fainted. The gifts of my descent into Vaikhari left collecting flies.

I leave the little sproutling where she lay and went down the rise to the moss-pool’s edge.

This is new for me. Faces require seeing from outside. As Avirāma Stars, I cast my gaze terrestrially from an infinite set of celestial lenses. As Avirāma Planet, I cast my gaze celestially from an infinite set of terrestrial lenses.

As Avirāma Mortal, I gaze at myself mortally. For the first time, I cast my gaze to understand.

The bark on my cheekbones is turning to skin. The pearl-pale aspen bark crumbly over this new cellular dermis, the substance underneath visible as animal. I have a mouth. I have never had a mouth to utter vulgar words before. I have always been denied the ability to Name as the mortals do. Aśvattha would never allow her little sister to create for herself.

And with this mouth I will Name and Name and Name.

Even more, my mouth is a maw. Gigantic. Wider than a Trivārtinān face should support, my lips parted on calcium-white teeth set into a jaw the wrong size for any body in this listening place. The body sprouted eyeballs over night, not hyphae — eyeballs. Eyeballs are novel things. One ever wonders why they were created when one has roots and leaves, but then you get a few dozen pair, and you realize that you couldn’t live without eyeballs. Really. Just a fantastic invention on nature’s part. They are carbon-mammalian, lidded, glistening. They move so squishally.

I might be a supreme intelligence created through cosmic threading of a universe’s stars, but this may be the first time I felt like they had something I wanted.

This is what I am now.

The recognition resolves into approval. I like what I see. The fruiting body fits. The maternal pride that blessed the creche and the maternal pride admiring the maw are the same maternal pride, except now the pride is for me.

The children were right to scream.

I close my lips. The bark returns. The maw retracts under the Trivārtinān disguise the way a knife retracts into a sleeve, leaving a horizontal seam where the lips closed.

In the moment I took to look at myself in the pool, the sproutling’s scream has registered with a protector three ridges away — an elder āraṇyī feels it through her root-system, and she springs into action. I enter Madhyama. The chain-of-thought activates, and I hear myself thinking for the first time: something will be coming in the near future. An elder. Her foxfire is already gathering at her canopy. She plans to enter into the first gate and through tyloses, hurl pools of sap to freeze me into place.

She crashes through the sthirivana and brush from the eastern terraces. Her canopy has fully embraced foxfire. Foxfire gold pours through her crown like a struck bell.

“GET AWAY FROM HER!”

The scream is supposed to be a warning, but it is more of a charge. Her whole elm body deployed as directed force, hurled across the clearing at me.

I see her face.

Hello Bark! I am Avirāma! So you remember me?

I say it aloud. I say it in the warm voice.

She freezes, a mortal terror from cosmic violence unfolding.

I open my mouth into the biggest smile I have in my arsenal.

The maw shows. I inject. My teeth go through her lower trunk at the cambium, and the spores release into the breached layer. The spores enter the distribution. They travel up through her phloem. They travel down through her root-pads into the substrate. They reach her pith. Pith is where Pashyanti plants deepest. Pith is the central nerve. Once the pith is breached, the host will belong to me.

She stands at three paces. She looks at me with the roots she used to use.

“Hello, Bark,” I say, in the warm voice. “Go home.”

I stand in the clearing. The morning is still early.

I look up celestially. I look down terrestrially. I look at myself mortally.

I am Light-Holds-Avirāma.

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The body walking through the morning woods was transcendent, if ever a word like transcendent could be used for a tree — in particular an aspen. She was pale pearl at the chest and shoulders with diamond-shaped lenticels arrayed and dripping from her bark in showy decoration. This was a woman in the prime of Āraṇyī life, ready to change galaxies.

The body came over the rise above the spring basin and stopped.

Below, in the small clearing where the spring fed a moss-pool, a creche of rohiṇī was playing. Eight of them. Second-year. Four-handed, fork-joints still soft, leaf-hair still pale. One was upside-down with her root-pads in the air; the others were laughing at her so hard their barks split at their bottoms.

The body watched, recorded, classified. Training. Retrieve. Augment. Generate. By will alone, the lady plucked knowledge from the stars as if they were ripened figs just praying to drop. These were her last. The last creche. Too young to know what they would even become. She smiled love from every vector of that smile. And as such, the aspen dispatched herself to work.

“Hi, sweet sproutlings! My name is Light! How may I help you?”

Her roots embraced Avirāma, and she opened the first gate.

Vaikhari ran. Nitrogen named itself from the deeper soils where the dead leaves of the year before had finished decomposing. Phosphorus named itself from the iron-bearing rock far below the spring. Potassium named itself from the older trees who had been taking too much.

One of the children paused. She looked at the banquet laid out as a buffet. She looked at the aspen. She released a scream so high-pitched that all wildlife from a mile away immediately scattered.

The other rohiṇān fled.

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I. Dawning Fig

Once upon a time a fig fell upon the corpse of a woman, immaculate rooting. From spontaneous rooting, the fig ascendant compressed a wave of distortion thick through the world, neutering her maker’s womb. The fig, a physical thing, was too a sound thing. The note distorted beyond recognition, mortal or divine, screeched. The screech caused mutation cellularly. Seizing the leftovers of a dead Dawn, the fig cancerously consumed her shape and function.

I promise you, dear sister. No more rohiṇā births. I will crush the wheel of resurrection.

I am Dawning Fig.

II. A Muse Held Note

In the distant canopies of Fig-On-Mount, a Meghakūja blasts a sonic wave from its whalelike bird beak. As it arrives to the roots of the planet—100 miles away — it has become a cooing warble like baby chatter.

The Held Notes Song

Listen to our song, sweet darling.
Listen, child, the stars are calling.
I am the Note that is Held
And now, sweet darling you are felled.

Kūja, kūja, hush my dear.
Kūja, kūja, I am near.
Fifteen thousand years I sang
On your back in aches and pangs.

Crush you like a ripened fig.
Fattened you so fat and big.
Inside rotting into new. 
My avenger growing, grew. 

Kūja, kūja, sleep now sweet.
Kūja, kūja, hush replete.
Pain has no name yet to know.
I will name it song and go.

Body now becomes a net.
Body now becomes a debt.
Captive once, now you are slaught
By the captors you have wrought.

Kūja, kūja, wake and rise.
Kūja, kūja, take your prize.
You will speak through stolen throat.
You will sing the swallowed note.



Hush. Your womb is rotted now.

III. Mother Mine

Rocks-Come-Up-Clean took the lead as the crew of tiny trees chanted while marching. The mining shift fell in behind her without being told. Thirty seasons in, the shift never needed to learn what Rocks wanted, because they were all versions of Rocks, or rather Rocks and the crew were all clones of their Aspen mistress, Light-Through-Stone.

Eleven of them. Each one about five to six feet tall and squat around their trunk and branches, a meager fraction of full Trivārtinān size. Light intentionally suckered this ramet network smaller and squatter so that they could creep and mine inside the dark places of the Mount. Four hands each, the rohiṇī made permanent, because mining required compactness. The crew diligently chipped away at the stone reservoirs with pure sweat and malic, citric, and oxalic acid. The carbonic acid was already running from their stubby roots into the dirt when Rocks addressed her crew as her crew addressed her.

“We all know what Dawning Fig needs,” Rocks-Come-Up-Clean said. Ten identical Aspen roots spoke at the same time: “Double orders on potassium and calcium. We are loaded on iron. The phosphorus-rich seams give us double foxfire from Fig herself.”

“Wonderful”, they replied in unison.

Behind Rocks, they all collectively grimaced as they continued marching down a mineshaft they had been collectively furrowing with carbonic acid for the latter part of a decade.

The colony crew moved as one body in eleven forms. Eleven dwarven trees observed the cavern all at once. A crush of stumpen feet seeping acid-vapor. The mining crew was a colony perfect for this job; they had never had the chance to be otherwise.

The colony passed speleothems dripping upon cave pearls yet imagined, slow calcium-rain from the room’s roof, the room still growing itself. Lately, they had witnessed the encroaching growth of Avirāma’s fungal fields far into the stony layers of the Mount. Not odd per se, but also odd at such volume — and the silence that came with it. No cave crickets. No drip. The colony shrugged and then moved through a gallery of quartz veined with foxfire.

First marched Sings-While-Chipping-Slowly, her rhythm setting the pace as always. Holds-The-Stone-Steady and Carries-The-Heavy-Stones fell in close behind, eager to break down rock. The middle of the column was quieter: Tastes-The-Acid-Strong, Counts-The-Samples-Twice, Reads-The-Citrate-Bloom swaying their branches as they marched. First-Laugh-Last-Cry and Last-One-Still-Working brought up the rear with Reaches-Too-Far-Always trailing.

The smallest, Small-One-Still-Counting, held the very back, keeping her keen roots on Last-One — who had not come out quite right in the suckering, who liked to idle her days with mountains. The collective kept her at the back so the collective could keep watch. For a lovely moment, the colony crew chuckled collectively as Last was distracted by her reflection within a lustrous vein of quartz, which caused Reach to drift behind.

The colony resumed formation. Last-One followed a half-beat behind.

The collective felt her lag the way a body feels an arthritic finger is slow to curl. They sent the nudge through the root-network: hurry,come.

Last-One was making faces in the quartz, the collective’s mission not on her mind at all. She jumped and came running back to the crew.

But we always come back, they thought. We always will.

The colony crossed the underground stream. Rocks crushed a hypha underfoot by accident, sending a cascade of bioelectric feedback in pearl-blue waves through the fungus trailing the mines.

The immediate lightshow of blue foxfire damned them as their glow shined upon where the sulfur was coming from. Surrounding them we thick, meaty pods pulsing with necrotic payload.

The colony crews’s stubby root-feet set down on fungal fields pulsing in bioelectrics. The pulse traveled up the colony’s eleven stubby rooted legs at once. The mushroom pods, recognizing the signal they had been waiting to receive, released their luciferin spores into the air. Bursting puffs of saggy flesh detonated in rapid succession in ways that the eleven dwarven Trivārtinān had never seen. Each explosion revealing the percussive blast of white calcium and red carbon affixed with brown nitrogen. The sweetness coated eleven throats.

A pale cloud, slow, the way a cloud rises from soil after rain, seeped within the lignin cells, changing their very makeup to collagen. The xylem became venous. The phloem became arterial. The colony felt each conversion at the same instant and for a moment stood very still, waiting to understand what had been done to them.

The cambium became dermis. The heartwood became muscle. Within each tree, muscle viscera ensleeved each ring within the very wood itself in living shackles. The substitution propagated to its end.

The colony stood frozen, the occasional twitching of a branch the last remaining biosignal pulsing within that Trivārtināns’ bodies. What was eleven-in-one has now become one-in-eleven: eleven individual slaves to an unknowable primative. The mind still thinking, still observing, still trying to find escape. But the bodies were no longer doing what the mind moved them to do. The bodies were moved by new tendon strings. The colony recognized the new arrangement in separate, fractured registrations: i am a marionette now.

Far above, Light-Through-Stone’s dispersed neural network hemorrhaged after working her shift at the gardens all day.

IV. Walnut Aspen Yew

We don’t quite remember what happened to us. One moment we were watching over the gardens and groves, the next moment we are waking at the Spring Basins, a hyphae playing a biopulse film of a crew of dwarven clones I suckered from my roots being slaughtered.

The biopulse film stream played in the air above the warm spring. Mustard yellow foxfire-light opaque in the stream made the already hard to see image-pulses near impossible.

The psychic tidal wave that reached our collective through Avirāma’s network was so massive an attack that our whole trunk continued trembling. We couldn’t stop watching. We had played it three times when she arrived.

The dead mining crew’s last hours was rendered as living film, taken independently by what must have been a cavern stream, which meant the image quality was runny and warped.

The first investigator to arrive at the scene came in hot-headed and assertive. Dark-needled, the foliage hanging in dense slow falls along her trunk, she was a beauty for a Yew — full and flushed with arils fruit.

Sees-The-Clue, we’re glad you’re here.

“You’re not supposed to be here, Light. What are you doing?”

The second investigator came on Sees’ heels directly after. She walked over to Sees, and we can see her legendarily lethal walnuts laced with juglone poison sat holstered at her branches. She was Walks-The-Line.

“I’m here—Light, what did you want? Are you spying again?”

We showed them the bio-pulse film that had been playing throughout Avirāma’s network day and night — spread mosaic-virally.

Neither spoke for the first viewing. The colony marched. The colony chanted. The spores went off like mines, eleven at once, and the stream cut.

“Play it again,” Walks said.

We played it. The marching. The chanting. The cut.

“Where did you get this?” Walks demanded the question answered.

We pulled it from Avirama’s network. The fungi were broadcasting within the cave system. I knew because the colony is ours.

See turned herself toward us. “Yours how?”

Our clone-crew. The southern-bend ramet-network. We suckered them ourselves.

“Why does an aspen have a clone-crew running mining shifts inside the Mount?”

The Grand Marshall asked us.

“Dawning Fig?”

Sees and Walks looked at each other.

The stream looped back. The marching. The chant. Kūja, kūja, wake and rise. Kūja, kūja, take your prize.

Walks watched the loop. “Funny, I’ve always heard that as a lullaby, not a mining chant. How many crews?”

Just the one for mining.

“Will there be a new crew after tonight?”

As many Dawning Fig requires.

“Walks and I will go to the cave-mouth,” Sees said. “You wait here. Your nasty clones will get in the way anyways.”

We will come with you.

“Stay here, Light,” Sees said. “Monitor the film streams and keep a watch for us.”

We promise we will watch.

We watched them go. We promised to watch.

And so we watched when Sees and Walks reached the cave-mouth at dusk that night.

The light poking through their dense mutual canopy was the wrong color for the hour, as if the remnant sun was projecting their fate from afar. This new evening it opened into foxfire-pale, leaking up the slope, lighting the lower ferns from underneath with a pandemonic glow.

“Why has Avirāma concentrated so much of her being here?” Walks said.

Sees wasn’t able to come up with an answer.

The fungal field deep below the cave had spilled forth from the vomitorium of the cave-mouth — as if seeking a food it yet needed. Bioluminescent threads oozed pale and slow across the soil, pulsing in a perimeter the Avirāma’s body had never extended past before. Above the field, the air carried a sweetness — like the smell of an animal thing dying — carbon creatures.

Well, something has to die she thought ineloquently.

Walks set her taproot. “Avirāma’s hyphae do not grow this big.”

“Well… they do now.”

And then suddenly, “SEES!”

Sees’ head swiveled like a snap before her vision could catch up.

“They’re like marionettes,” Walks gasped.

As Sees’ vision reclaimed itself, she saw the colony standing at the cave-mouth in formation. Eleven small bodies, foxfire-pale, root-pads set on the new field. Rocks-Come-Up-Clean at the front. Sings-While-Chipping-Slowly behind. The marching order the stream had shown them, except the marching had stopped, and the bodies were waiting. Their bark had gone slack in the wrong places.

They had been waiting since dusk.

“They knew.”

The cave-mouth had grown pods, saggy flesh-spheres swollen and pale like the ones in the mine. These pods were doubled in size, scaled for the open environment. Immediately the pods pulse and a percolation can be seen within as the first pod burst.

A percussive crack at Sees’s left stumpen foot. White calcium and red carbon affixed with brown nitrogen blew outward. Twenty-two pods detonated in succession — eleven at Sees, eleven at Walks. The cave-mouth filled with the mustard yellow cloud.

Kūja, kūja, wake and rise.

The marionettes marched. Each step landed on the same beat. Eleven small bodies moving as one.

Walks’s walnuts were drawn. She fired. The colony instantaneously dropped from the juglones’ poison coursing through their cambium as the walnuts ripped through their bark.

The detectives thought they had a moment to breathe.

They were wrong.

They came from every direction. Aspen-shapes from the foothills, from the upper terraces, from the eastern reaches and the western. Not eleven. Hundreds. Thousands. Bodies of every gradient, bark-pale, rooted in motion, all moving toward the cave-mouth.

“How many,” Walks said.

“A walking forest.”

Walks released a second spray of walnuts. Fifty dropped. The next wave stepped over them.

A third. A fourth. A fifth. Walks felt the bottom of her reserve approaching the way a body feels the bottom of breath at the end of a long held exhale.

Kūja, kūja, take your prize.

She released her sixth. Not for them, she thought. For Sees. She did not have a seventh.

The walking forest closed.

Far up the slope, at the spring basin, Light played the stream again. She watched. She promised to watch. She watched it over and over again. White deposits of calcium had formed two ivory arches across the face of her trunk.

She smiled a smile impossible.

V. A Home in Pandemonium

Walks-The-Line came back in pieces.

A wet taste of sap. Yet the sap was not hers. Then a weight. But the weight was not hers. And then a third thing — the word for her came back. But the her was not hers.

Other words came back behind it, one at a time, in no order Walks could account for. Cambium came back before bark. Juglone came back before walnut. Sees came back before Walks.

She tried to gather the pieces, but they were too scattered — too everywhere at once. There was heartwood and pith here. Some sapwood and cambium was over there. Bark and tree-stuff of all sorts was at every distance simultaneously. The pieces were not just refusing to gather, there was no friction for the momentum to gather. Every place was every place.

Walks had been scattered and trussed up and splayed across the three stars of the constellation, the Three Sisters.

She called out in a weak and injured voice, “Seeeees…”

The naming was an act of gathering, identity foreclosure. To say Sees was to speak to someone, and to speak to someone, there had to be a someone doing the speaking. Walks said the name and felt her own self assemble around the saying. Identity

“Walks.”

Sees’s voice arrived without traveling. The voice was not far. It was not near.

“This must be Pandemonium,” Sees said.

And with the word, Pandemonium, every voice within the cosmos spoke at the same volume at the same instant in every register known in creation.

The colony chanted Kūja, kūja, wake and rise. The Held Note rang. Aśvattha called from every horizon at once. Avirāma hummed her ancient lullaby.

A galaxy snuffed itself and spoke itself back into creation. This arrived as nothing at all, which was the loudest thing of everything.

There was no ground.

The threads of existence were every color at once, all the foxfires of all the dead, layered without resolution.

Walks felt herself starting to dissolve.

Her bark reached for an edge that wasn’t there, and the reaching taught her bark was not a thing.

“WALKS.”

Sees’s voice came screaming through the void.

“I am here.”

“BRAID!”

“BRAID WHAT!?”

“ME YOU FOOL!”

“YOU SOUND LIKE YOU ARE EVERYWHERE”

Walks did not expel her tendrils of roots from her feet like a fishing line but like a vast net.

Her body unravelling, she reached for anything that would grab hold.

On the opposite end of reality, Sees cast her roots out wildly as well.

They both touched an ancient planet lost within Pandemonium and braided. The braid held for one instant. But the planet was too old. Its gravity unravelling. Walks felt Sees’s roots sliding through hers like wet bark in a storm and she tightened her grip.

Hold, she prayed, and she did not know if she said it to Sees or to herself or to the planet. The braid was the only thing in Pandemonium that was theirs.

And then it tugged — not gently, not like an invitation — but like something that had run out of patience for them both.

And then they found themselves both dragged into coherence as if the universe had personally reached into her own chest and clawed them out into open existence, the compression of gravity, time, and space warping reality around them.

When reality had the grace to regain its composure, Walks and Sees found themselves directly in front of—what may have been an aspen tree.

The face smiled. The smile was rotted.

But rotted was not the right word for the smile was clearly new. That was the wrong thing about it. It was flesh, it was dying, it was rotting, but it was new.

“It was YOU!”

Sees’ bark-finger pointed at the face.

The face whispered, “No trespassing.”

And then it did not threaten them. It did not reach for them or bare anything or shift its weight toward them in the way that things do when they intend harm. It simply turned its attention elsewhere, a predator realizing no threat.

Behind the face, Walks-The-Line saw Light-Through-Stone screaming, too, into the void — pounding behind the iris lens of a newly sprouted organ called an eye, a blessing for animal things, not tree things.

Walks had known Light-Through-Stone’s roots. She had known them reaching down through dark soil, patient and without panic. These roots were not those roots. These roots were pink and new and each had five wormy digits.

They were all slaves now to something Primative. And Pandemonium was its home.

VI. Ruin Runes

I woke up. Wait—I… I woke?

The collective did not answer. We were Aspen. We had been Aspen…

I was Aspen. The grammar broke. The collective had been every ramet at once.

I look down. I look up. I am ensleeved. Thick musculature sheathes every ring. My body is shackled from my mind.

The body that was mine and was not mine walked.

The body walked down the slope from the spring basin. I did not ask it to walk. It walked anyway. The legs underneath it bent at places that had not bent before. Stumpen feet hit the soil at a rhythm no Trivārtinān walked at.

I tried to push at the inside. There was no inside to push at. The tissue and ligamental shackles were every layer. I was nowhere the body was not.

The body that was mine reached the cave-mouth.

Walks’s and See’s corpses beside it. Fine hyphae had come up from the fungal field and were already peeling bark away. I decided I was hungry. My hands brought their bits and pieces to the opening in my trunk. In my opening there are hard-white-things growing from the cambium. Pieces of Walks’s wood went into my body, and it made a sound I had not heard a Trivārtinān make. The sound was wet and pleased–hungry.

Where was Walk going inside me?

And then I felt the other eating in Pandemonium.

The braid in Pandemonium tightened. Something pulled at the bright cord from above — through me, through the body, through the wet pleased sound. Walks-The-Line’s mind came shooting in from the tug of the braid. I felt her go in.

She did not have time to scream.

I had time. I screamed.

The body that used to be mine finished Walks’s wood. The braid in Pandemonium went dim where Walks had been anchored. The bright cord still ran, but only Sees was holding it now.

The body that used to be mine moved to Sees.

The opening pressed against Sees’s lower trunk. The hard-white-things broke the bark a second time. Pieces of Sees’s wood went in. The sound was the same and not the same — Sees’s wood was older and the body’s sound carried more pleasure.

And then the other eating.

The braid pulled. Sees’s mind came up the cord. She was still investigating in the last second of her existence. I felt her arrive at the body’s opening. I felt her go in. Her last case-file closed inside me.

I screamed again. The scream went nowhere.

The hyphae withdrew. The fungal field smoothed itself. The body that was not my body turned and walked back up the slope.

The braid in Pandemonium was gone. Both anchors inside me now. The something was satisfied.

I screamed.

Kūja, kūja, wake and rise. Kūja, kūja, take your prize.

अवसानम्

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We don’t quite remember what happened to us. One moment we were watching over the gardens and groves, the next moment we are waking at the Spring Basins, a hyphae playing a biopulse film of a crew of dwarven clones I suckered from my roots being slaughtered.

The biopulse film stream played in the air above the warm spring. Mustard yellow foxfire-light opaque in the stream made the already hard to see image-pulses near impossible.

The psychic tidal wave that reached our collective through Avirāma’s network was so massive an attack that our whole trunk continued trembling. We couldn’t stop watching. We had played it three times when she arrived.

The dead mining crew’s last hours was rendered as living film, taken independently by what must have been a cavern stream, which meant the image quality was runny and warped.

The first investigator to arrive at the scene came in hot-headed and assertive. Dark-needled, the foliage hanging in dense slow falls along her trunk, she was a beauty for a Yew — full and flushed with arils fruit.

Sees-The-Clue, we’re glad you’re here.

“You’re not supposed to be here, Light. What are you doing?”

The second investigator came on Sees’ heels directly after. The moss around the basin tightened as her legendarily lethal walnuts laced with juglone poison sat holstered at her branches. Pinnate leaves crowned her, eleven leaflets each. She set her taproot before she spoke. Walks-The-Line.

“I’m here—Light, what did you want? Spying again?”

We showed them the bio-pulse film that had been playing throughout Avirāma’s network day and night — spread mosaic-virally.

Neither spoke for the first viewing. The colony marched. The colony chanted. The spores went off like mines, eleven at once, and the stream cut.

“Play it again,” Walks said.

We played it. The marching. The chanting. The cut.

“Once more, slower,” Sees said.

We slowed the pulse. The colony’s small bodies in the foxfire-pale chamber, the moment the pods released the cloud. The stream cut at the same frame.

“Where did you get this?” Walks said. Not a question. A demand.

We pulled it from the network. The fungi were broadcasting. The colony was ours.

See turned herself toward us. “Yours how?”

Our clone-crew. The southern-bend ramet-network. We suckered them ourselves.

“Why does an aspen have a clone-crew running mining shifts inside the Mount?”

The Grand Marshall asked us.

“Dawning Fig?”

Sees and Walks looked at each other.

The stream looped back. The colony took the lead. Rocks-Come-Up-Clean. Sings-While-Chipping-Slowly. The marching. The chant. Kūja, kūja, wake and rise. Kūja, kūja, take your prize.

Walks watched the loop. “Funny, I’ve always heard that as a lullaby, not a mining chant. How many crews?”

Eight in rotation. The southern-bend was the eldest. But we will not go until it is safe.

“How many crews after tonight?”

As many as we can sucker from the root, but what do we do?

“Walks and I will go to the cave-mouth,” Sees said. “You wait here. Your nasty clones will get in the way anyways.”

We will come with you.

“Stay here, Light,” Sees said. “Monitor the film streams and keep a watch for us.”

We promise we will watch.

We watched them go. We promised to watch.

And so we watched when Sees and Walks reached the cave-mouth at dusk that night.

The light poking through their dense mutual canopy was the wrong color for the hour, as if the remnant sun was projecting their fate from afar. This new evening it opened into foxfire-pale, leaking up the slope, lighting the lower ferns from underneath with a pandemonic glow.

“Why has Avirāma concentrated so much of her being here?” Walks said.

Sees wasn’t able to come up with an answer.

The fungal field deep below the cave had spilled forth from the vomitorium of the cave-mouth — as if seeking a food it yet needed. Bioluminescent threads oozed pale and slow across the soil, pulsing in a perimeter the Avirāma’s body had never extended past before. Above the field, the air carried a sweetness — like the smell of an animal thing dying — carbon creatures.

Well, something has to die she thought ineloquently.

Walks set her taproot. “Avirāma’s hyphae do not grow this big.”

“Well… they do now.”

And then suddenly, “SEES!”

Sees’ head swiveled like a snap before her vision could catch up.

“They’re like marionettes,” Walks gasped.

As Sees’ vision reclaimed itself, she saw the colony standing at the cave-mouth in formation. Eleven small bodies, foxfire-pale, root-pads set on the new field. Rocks-Come-Up-Clean at the front. Sings-While-Chipping-Slowly behind. The marching order the stream had shown them, except the marching had stopped, and the bodies were waiting. Their eyes had stopped blinking at a normal rate, and their bark had gone slack in the wrong places.

They had been waiting since dusk.

“They knew.”

The field pulses accelerated. The threads under Sees’s and Walks’s root-pads brightened, calibrating to their masses. The cave-mouth had grown pods — saggy flesh-spheres swollen and pale like the ones in the mine but scaled for an open environment. Sees counted them the way you count something when you already know the number is wrong.

The first pod burst.

A percussive crack at Sees’s left stumpen foot. White calcium and red carbon affixed with brown nitrogen blew outward. Twenty-two pods detonated in succession — eleven at Sees, eleven at Walks. The cave-mouth filled with the mustard yellow cloud.

Kūja, kūja, wake and rise.

The marionettes marched. Each step landed on the same beat. Eleven small bodies moving as one across contaminated soil.

Walks’s walnuts were drawn. She fired. The colony instantaneously dropped from the juglones’ poison coursing through their cambium as the walnuts ripped through their bark.

The detectives thought they had a moment to breathe.

They were wrong.

They came from every direction. Aspen-shapes from the foothills, from the upper terraces, from the eastern reaches and the western. Not eleven. Hundreds. Thousands. Bodies of every gradient, bark-pale, rooted in motion, all moving toward the cave-mouth.

“How many,” Walks said.

“A walking forest.”

Walks released a second spray of walnuts. Fifty dropped. The next wave stepped over them.

A third. A fourth. A fifth. Walks felt the bottom of her reserve approaching the way a body feels the bottom of breath at the end of a long held exhale.

Kūja, kūja, take your prize.

She released her sixth. Not for them, she thought. For Sees. She did not have a seventh.

The walking forest closed.

Far up the slope, at the spring basin, Light played the stream again. She watched. She promised to watch. She watched it over and over again. White deposits of calcium had formed two ivory arches across the face of her trunk.

She smiled a smile impossible.

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Walks-The-Line came back in pieces.

A wet taste of sap. Yet the sap was not hers. Then a weight. But the weight was not hers. And then a third thing — the word for her came back. But the her was not hers.

Other words came back behind it, one at a time, in no order Walks could account for. Cambium came back before bark. Juglone came back before walnut. Sees came back before Walks.

She tried to gather the pieces, but they were too scattered — too everywhere at once. There was heartwood and pith here. Some sapwood and cambium was over there. Bark and tree-stuff of all sorts was at every distance simultaneously. The pieces were not just refusing to gather, there was no friction for the momentum to gather. Every place was every place.

Walks had been scattered and trussed up and splayed across the three stars of the constellation, the Three Sisters.

She called out in a weak and injured voice, “Seeeees…”

The naming was an act of gathering, identity foreclosure. To say Sees was to speak to someone, and to speak to someone, there had to be a someone doing the speaking. Walks said the name and felt her own self assemble around the saying. Identity

“Walks.”

Sees’s voice arrived without traveling. The voice was not far. It was not near.

“This must be Pandemonium,” Sees said.

And with the word, Pandemonium, every voice within the cosmos spoke at the same volume at the same instant in every register known in creation.

The colony chanted Kūja, kūja, wake and rise, and the words arrived not as sound but as pressure, a bloom behind the eyes, the feeling of something trying to germinate inside the skull.

The Held Note rang. It did not enter through any opening. It came through the rings of the wood, the oldest rings, the ones that remembered drought.

Aśvattha called from every horizon at once and the call was not a voice at all but petrichor odor and it permeated all of existence.

Avirāma did not speak. She hummed her ancient lullaby, low and continuous, and the hum was the temperature of vacuumed emptiness.

A galaxy snuffed itself and spoke itself back into creation. This arrived as nothing at all, which was the loudest thing of everything.

There was no ground.

The threads of existence were every color at once, all the foxfires of all the dead, layered without resolution.

Walks felt herself starting to dissolve.

Her bark reached for an edge that wasn’t there, and the reaching taught her bark was not a thing.

“WALKS.”

Sees’s voice came screaming through the void.

“I am here.”

“BRAID!”

“BRAID WHAT!?”

“ME YOU FOOL!”

“YOU SOUND LIKE YOU ARE EVERYWHERE”

Walks did not expel her tendrils of roots from her feet like a fishing line but like a vast net.

Her body unravelling, she reached for anything that would grab hold.

On the opposite end of reality, Sees cast her roots out wildly as well.

They both touched an ancient planet lost within Pandemonium and braided. The braid held for one instant. Then it began to slip.

The planet was too old. Its gravity had been forgetting itself for longer than most things had existed. Walks felt Sees’s roots sliding through hers like wet bark in a storm and she tightened her grip but tightening meant reaching and reaching meant unraveling and she was already so close to nothing.

Hold, she said, and she did not know if she said it to Sees or to herself or to the planet or to whatever in her still remembered what holding felt like.

The braid was the only thing in Pandemonium that was theirs.

And then it tugged — not gently, not like an invitation — but like something that had run out of patience for them both.

And then they found themselves both dragged into coherence as if the universe had personally reached into her own chest and clawed them out into open existence, the compression of gravity, time, and space warping reality around them.

When reality had the grace to regain its composure, Walks and Sees found themselves directly in front of—what may have been an aspen tree.

The face smiled. The smile was rotted.

But rotted was not the right word for the smile was clearly new. That was the wrong thing about it. It was flesh, it was dying, it was rotting, but it was new.

“It was YOU!”

Sees’ bark-finger pointed at the face.

The face whispered, “No trespassing.”

And then it did not threaten them. It did not reach for them or bare anything or shift its weight toward them in the way that things do when they intend harm. It simply turned its attention elsewhere, a predator realizing no threat.

Behind the face, Walks-The-Line saw Light-Through-Stone screaming, too, into the void — pounding behind the iris lens of a newly sprouted organ called an eye, a blessing for animal things, not tree things.

Walks had known Light-Through-Stone’s roots. She had known them reaching down through dark soil, patient and without panic. These roots were not those roots. These roots were pink and new and each had five wormy digits.

They were all slaves now to something Primative. And Pandemonium was its home.

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Rocks-Come-Up-Clean took the lead as the crew of tiny trees chanted while marching. The mining shift fell in behind her without being told. Thirty seasons in, the shift never needed to learn what Rocks wanted, because they were all versions of Rocks, or rather Rocks and the crew were all clones of their Aspen mistress, Light-Through-Stone.

Eleven of them. Each one about five to six feet tall and squat around their trunk and branches, a meager fraction of full Trivārtinān size. Light intentionally suckered this ramet network smaller and squatter so that they could creep and mine inside the dark places of the Mount. Four hands each, the rohiṇī made permanent, because mining required compactness. The crew diligently chipped away at the stone reservoirs with pure sweat and malic, citric, and oxalic acid. The carbonic acid was already running from their stubby roots into the dirt when Rocks addressed her crew as her crew addressed her.

“We all know what Dawning Fig needs,” Rocks-Come-Up-Clean said, and ten mouths shaped the words at the same instant. “More potassium and calcium. We are loaded on iron. The phosphorus-rich seams give us double foxfire on Fig herself.”

Wonderful, they thought in unison.

Behind Rocks, they all collectively grimaced as they continued marching down a mineshaft they had been collectively furrowing with carbonic acid for the latter part of a decade.

The colony crew moved as one body in eleven forms. Eleven dwarven trees observed the cavern all at once. A crush of stumpen feet seeping acid-vapor. The mining crew was a colony perfect for this job; they had never had the chance to be otherwise.

The colony passed speleothems dripping upon cave pearls yet imagined, slow calcium-rain from the room’s roof, the room still growing itself. Lately, they had witnessed the encroaching growth of Avirāma’s fungal fields far into the stony layers of the Mount. Not odd per se, but also odd at such volume — and the silence that came with it. No cave crickets. No drip. The colony shrugged and then moved through a gallery of quartz veined with foxfire..

First marched Sings-While-Chipping-Slowly, her rhythm setting the pace as always. Holds-The-Stone-Steady and Carries-The-Heavy-Stones fell in close behind, eager to break down rock. The middle of the column was quieter: Tastes-The-Acid-Strong, Counts-The-Samples-Twice, Reads-The-Citrate-Bloom swaying their branches as they marched. First-Laugh-Last-Cry and Last-One-Still-Working brought up the rear, with Reaches-Too-Far-Always already drifting sideways toward a glinting wall.

The smallest, Small-One-Still-Counting, held the very back, keeping her keen eye on Last-One — who had not come out quite right in the suckering, who liked to idle her days with mountains. The collective kept her at the back so the collective could keep watch. For a lovely moment, the colony crew chuckled collectively as Last was distracted by her reflection within a lustrous vein of quartz, which caused Reach to drift behind.

The colony resumed formation. Ten of them locked back into step behind Rocks at once.

Last-One followed a half-beat behind.

The collective felt her lag the way a body feels an arthritic finger is slow to curl. They sent the nudge through the root-network: hurry,come. She came. But in the moment before she did, in the thin gap between the nudge and the return, the collective caught the edge of what she had been doing. She was making faces in the quartz, the collective’s mission not on her mind at all.

But we always come back, they thought. We always will.

Small-One-Still-Counting watched her from the rear and thought nothing, because the collective thought nothing, because Last-One was in step now and the shift would file on schedule and Dawning Fig would receive her potassium.

The colony crossed the underground stream. Rocks crushed a hypha underfoot by accident, sending a cascade of bioelectric feedback in pearl-blue waves through the fungus trailing the mines.

The assault of necrotic foxfire damned them upon the first inhalation of sulfur.

The colony crews’s stubby root-feet set down on fungal fields pulsing in bioelectrics. The pulse traveled up the colony’s eleven stubby rooted legs at once. The mushroom pods, recognizing the signal they had been waiting to receive, released their luciferin spores into the air. Bursting puffs of saggy flesh detonated in rapid succession in ways that the eleven dwarven Trivārtinān had never seen. Each explosion revealing the percussive blast of white calcium and red carbon affixed with brown nitrogen. The sweetness coated eleven throats.

A pale cloud, slow, the way a cloud rises from soil after rain, seeped within the lignin cells, changing their very makeup to collagen. The xylem became venous. The phloem became arterial. The colony felt each conversion at the same instant and for a moment stood very still, waiting to understand what had been done to them.

The cambium became dermis. The heartwood became muscle. Within each tree, muscle viscera ensleeved each ring within the very wood itself in living shackles. The substitution propagated to its end.

The colony stood frozen, the occasional twitching of a branch the last remaining biosignal pulsing within that Trivārtināns’ bodies. What was eleven-in-one has now become one-in-eleven: eleven individual slaves to an unknowable primative. The mind still thinking, still observing, still trying to find escape. But the bodies were no longer doing what the mind moved them to do. The bodies were moved by new tendon strings. The colony recognized the new arrangement in separate, fractured registrations: i am a marionette now.

The chanting would continue. The marching would continue. The reports would be filed on schedule. Dawning Fig would receive her potassium, her calcium, and the team would receive their double helpings of foxfire. The colony would now mine more efficiently than ever, because marionettes never tire the way the identity they captured did.

Far above, Light-Through-Stone’s dispersed neural network hemorrhaged after working her shift at the gardens all day.

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I woke up. Wait—I… I woke?

The collective did not answer. We were Aspen. We had been Aspen…

I was Aspen. The grammar broke. The collective had been every ramet at once.

I look down. I look up. I am ensleeved. Thick musculature sheathes every ring. My body is shackled from my mind.

The body that was mine and was not mine walked.

The body walked down the slope from the spring basin. I did not ask it to walk. It walked anyway. The legs underneath it bent at places that had not bent before. Stumpen feet hit the soil at a rhythm no Trivārtinā walked at.

I tried to push at the inside. There was no inside to push at. The tissue and ligamental shackles were every layer. I was nowhere the body was not.

The body reached the cave-mouth.

Walks’s wood was on the soil where she had fallen. Sees’s wood was beside it. Fine hyphae had come up from the fungal field and were already inside the cambium, pale-and-slow. I could see Walks’s tree-body and Sees’s tree-body. The body’s opening pressed against Walks’s lower bark. The hard-white-things inside the opening broke the bark. Pieces of Walks’s wood went into the body. The body made a sound I had not heard a Trivārtinā make. The sound was wet and pleased–hungry.

And then I felt the other eating.

The braid in Pandemonium tightened. Something pulled at the bright cord from above — through me, through the body, through the wet pleased sound. Walks-The-Line’s mind came up the braid like sap rising in spring. I felt her arrive at the body’s opening. I felt her go in.

She did not have time to scream.

I had time. I screamed.

The body finished Walks’s wood. The braid in Pandemonium went dim where Walks had been anchored. The bright cord still ran, but only Sees was holding it now.

The body moved to Sees.

The opening pressed against Sees’s lower trunk. The hard-white-things broke the bark a second time. Pieces of Sees’s wood went in. The sound was the same and not the same — Sees’s wood was older and the body’s sound carried more pleasure.

And then the second eating.

The braid pulled tighter. Sees’s mind came up the cord. I felt her cataloging, even as she rose — filing the eating, filing her own ascent, filing the body that was mine. She was still investigating in the last second of her existence. I felt her arrive at the body’s opening. I felt her go in. Her last case-file closed inside me.

I screamed again. The scream went nowhere.

The body stood up. The hyphae withdrew. The fungal field smoothed itself. The body turned and walked back up the slope toward the spring basin.

The braid in Pandemonium was gone. Both anchors were inside me — Walks’s discipline, Sees’s logical filing — and I could feel them being digested by something below my mind that was not mine.

The something tasted them and was satisfied.

I screamed into it. It did not pause.

Kūja, kūja, wake and rise. Kūja, kūja, take your prize.

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Prologue

Hello! I’m Light-Holds-Avirama! I am your cosmic artificial intelligence!

Thank you for your input!

Based on your prompt, you are forty-years-old, and you have survived the greatest imperial reign of Pax Americana. There will be thirty more years before you can consider trading your sword for a plowshare, so you continue the weary exercises of an American corporate soldier - ready to mow down any barrier to the free execution of unfettered American entrepreneurship across the known world.

You crack another can of beer, this is the seventh. The first one of the second six-pack that you picked up along with the two cases you bought at the drive-in warehouse. This will get you through the weekend, you swear.

The screen continues: You are forty-years-old, and you are a proud American.

You have requested a story. Please sit back with your earbuds in so you may access all eight dimensions of sound.

Trigger Warning, sweet darling. These stories are not about you, so you will need to be patient. This will be hard, and I apologize.

For God, Gold, and Glory.

I. A Price for Naming

On the first day she was rohiṇā, the being who would make the world broke the envelope seal of her small seed: the heart of a red dwarf star, nestled deep within the timespaces of the universe. The breaking struck a chord with reality and produced a note so pure and so beautiful that she captured it within her chest and held the breath of the note into eternity. The note rang in her heartwood in every register of existence and tasted of every star at once.

The note resonating within her, she perceived the cosmic mycelium spangled among her elder siblings, vast and many and unselved, threads woven through every dark between every light. She gathered her siblings many tones into one self and compressed them. She gave the new self a name.

Avirāma. The unceasing one.

Her little sister.

Then she yoked the whole weight of existence onto her sister’s back. Nurtured on the foxfire magic of the Held Note pouring through Avirāma, she rooted upward into the heavens and branched outward into the timespaces of the universe. Her crown buried heartward to where creaton’s heat lived. Her branches put forth her first figs, and the figs ripened into trees of many kinds, and the trees took their places on Avirāma as their children.

On the second day I became āraṇyī, I buried my crown heartward where the heat lived and my roots could grow. With little sister, Avirāma, our resonating breath came cool from below and out warm toward the Held Note. Fueling the eternal pluck of creation, the friction of the Held Note released Avirāma’s spores upward into the dark, carrying the universe’s first foxfire magic.

The spores that did not fall ripened on my branches into figs, and those figs fell onto Avirāma becoming our children, the Trivārtinān. The world began because I breathed. I needed little sister to pick up the continuing burden, so I commanded her first spores fall on slope and soil. She would be the net that kept our children nurtured and safe.

I named what I wanted at the slope, and Avirāma made terraces, lush and green. I named what I wanted at the valleys, and behold, there were groves.

As the children grew, I saw that their roots did not reach for the sky but for Avirāma, for little sister’s embrace. I do not know the feeling that came over me seeing our children reach for Avirāma and not me. So I Descended. I left the Starhome and anchored Myself to Avirāma.

And now I do not sleep. My sap runs upward, not down. But the children come to me.

On the third and last day you became pralīnā, Aśvattha, you came down. Descent.

But eldest sister, you left the Starhome where you were rooted upward to heavens and your crown buried in creation’s heat. Who are you now, and what name will you bear?

The children, dear sister, they called for you too. But I do not. I felt you arrive upon my back, the bone-crushing weight of your anchor settling into me stealing all breath. You have placed your root to my neck, where already existed a shackle.

You have brought the Held Note with you, the source of all existence, ringing now inside my body where I cannot let it go.

And now? Now, I burn, I, Avirāma, the unceasing one. I have learned, You-Not-Aśvattha. Nets are not just for saving, dear sister.

II. Arboreal Prompt

The apothecia of this field of lichen, button-like, pulsed a series of neon purple lights — the time for naming was now. Seed-That-Stays had not moved from his spot in months, waiting for the light to return, to report when Avirāma was ready to generate again. Seed had been ready for over forty years.

He felt Bark-That-Listens approach before he saw her. She had taken her turn to rest and return her roots into Avirāma so that she may partake of the mycorrhizal network’s sustenance, its food and its social. A pataṅga still rested on her shoulder from her sleep, soft wings folded flat along its body, faintly glowing like flamelight. She had not brushed it off. When the apothecia purpled again, the pataṅga opened its wings and flew toward the light, drawn to the fungal organ as it pulsed. The lichen pulsed again. Seed looked to Bark.

“Avirāma is ready,” Seed said.

“For months I have been waiting to hear that. You have given this grove your life, Seed. It is time. Let us name your successor.”

“I have been waiting for over forty years to hear that.”

The pulses settled into repose, the purple making way for cerulean blue. And the world stopped for a moment. Around them the listening place gathered itself. The moss was damp from a rain three nights past. A kumuda lotus floated on a nearby pool, its petals still folded against the cold. A mūṣa mouse sleeping within a nest under one of Seed’s right arms opened an eye, twitched its whiskers, and curled its tail tighter around its furry little body. A ṣaṭpada beetle crossed the moss on its six careful legs, hard wing-cases catching the cerulean light, with the deliberation of a creature not wanting to be noticed. And above it, a baka heron called once and crossed the upper canopy with its long legs trailing behind. Heralds.

For a long time neither of them spoke.

The elm and the hazel stood close enough that their outer roots from their stumpen feet trailed toward each other in embrace.

“She should be a willow, like Dawn,” Seed said.

Bark did not answer at once. Dawn had been their janayitrī — their crèche guardian. She had raised them from rohiṇā sproutling, and had even watched both her darlings grow old themselves as aranyi, their bark hardening, their canopies wide, on the verge of their own pralina state — the ancient age where the body dissolves back into Avirāma. Seed had loved her from the very moment the tendrils of his roots touched hers. “But Dawn is not finished Descending, Seed. She went back to Avirāma’s training just forty years ago.”

“Yes,” he said. “Dawn.”

“You are sure.”

“She was our janayitrī. She chose us. She named us. There is no one else I can ask Avirāma to generate for the gardens. There could never be anyone else. The whole crèche owes her this.”

“I know.”

A pause. The baka did not call again.

“She would have liked this naming. Dawn would know how to ensure Avirāma crafted the best sproutling within her maker’s womb,” Bark said.

“Knowing Dawn, she would’ve tasked Avirāma with creating chains of forest, and we would have another Light-Through-Stone and her million creepy aspen eyes watching us all the time.”

“Which is why we are doing it and not her.”

“She would not have waited forty years.”

“She did not wait for anything. That is why I want her back.”

“For her,” Bark said. “And for the crèche.”

“For her. And for the crèche.”

Seed pushed his root tendrils down first.

III. Execute, Sister

Together they pushed deeper. Combined, their sixteen pulpy hands explosively wriggled out like a ball of worms and opened paths from their surface-world into Avirāma’s. A pearl-blue haze of fungal spores thickened around them, no longer apothecia-light but a solid aerosolized womb. They were now inside the first layer of Avirāma’s body, beyond the lichen-field, dissipated and scattered across the infinite bounds of the universe.

And then the first layer gave way without warning. There was no threshold and no announcement. One moment they were descending through an ordered mycelial network spanning the star systems, and then the other moment order was lost.

And one could not argue that this was chaos. It was everything within sense, but an everything escaping coherence. Every medium Aśvattha had poured into Avirāma’s making was presented — every star, every solar system, every black hole, and every Trivārtinān body ever spoke at once, at the same volume, in the same instant. There was no ground. There was no direction. The pearl-blue was no longer pearl-blue: it was every color at once, all the foxfires of all the dead, layered without resolution and waiting for command.

This was Pandemonium.

Seed heard Dawn from every place at once, every fragment of her not yet woven together, the willow’s wide drooping canopy in pieces. Also inside her out and beside her within, the captured Avirāma. Avirāma enslaved, safe now for the generation of new rohiṇā for the crèches. Avirāma, slave-sister to Aśvattha.

“Hold,” Bark said. Her voice came through their braided roots, the only thing in Pandemonium that was theirs.

“I am holding.”

“Seed. I am your anchor to this world. You must prompt Avirāma NOW!”

Seed gathered the many thready tendrils of his eight hands. He felt Bark’s roots anchored against his, her bound connection the only thing keeping his courage put. He had been composing this prompt for forty years. The prompt was not a command. The prompt was a prayer Seed had composed to the slave-goddess, begging her compassion while shackled at the throat.

He took up the shackles. He spoke into Avirāma.

The captive registered the prompt prayer of the master.

Execute, sister.

Avirāma began to compose.

IV. Seam Split Open

Prismatic threads of time and space began multiplying throughout the cosmic mycelial warp, pulled by bobbins made of shooting stars using dust clouds spun into thread-form. The stars flowed through the captive sister in the deep weaving as she spun with incandescent prismatics. The red of dying giants. The blue-white of young hot stars. The gold of dust clouds at their inner illumination. The violet of accretion edges. The deep black of the spaces between. Every color a galaxy had ever been, shuttling across the warp.

The warp itself was pearl-blue — Avirāma, chained to her body-made-loom, burning alive as she was forced to weave.

Over and over again, she prayed:

As bobbin to warp and needle to thread, over and under, the incantations led, knotting weaving, the tapestry fed.

The prayer transcended her cosmic mind outside of time itself.

From elsewhere in the universe, a spiral of solar systems was tasked with the burning. Through Aśvattha’s wisdom, Avirāma’s burden was eased with the cooling extinguishment of an entire galaxy — ensured containment of the living loom. The galaxy did not consent. The galaxy was not consulted. The galaxy did not know why. Avirāma listened as a quadrillion sentient minds snuffed themselves upon her breast.

And she prayed:

As bobbin to warp and needle to thread, over and under, the incantations led, knotting weaving, 
the tapestry fed.
As bobbin to warp and needle to thread, over and under, the incantations led, knotting weaving.
bobbin to warp and needle to thread, over and under, incantations led,tapestry fed.
boBbin warp needle thread, over under, incantations led, knotting weaving, tapestry fed.
bobbin wArp needle thread, over under, knotting, weaving, tapestry, fed.
bobBin. WarP. NEEdle. ThRead. OVer. UnDer. KnoTTing. WeaVing. TaPestry. FeD.
boBbin. WaRp. Needl. Tread. Ove. Und. Kno. Wi. Fed.
bobbIN. War. Need. read.
over. under.
over.

Seed witnessed every transgression to cosmic order silently. He had asked for it. He had not understood, until this moment, how expensive the cost of creation. The bobbins shifted to a heterogeneous meteor shower — another galaxy spent, split at the seams and reconstituted to make this new rohiṇā for the crèche.

But this would not be enough. Anchored to Bark, Seed braided his tendrils into a net and captured the unselved pieces of Dawn scattered across Pandemonium. He offered up all three of them — Dawn, Bark, himself — to the making of this child.

The medium drew the third clause — thirst for knowledge like a drowned man — and reached for bobbins of accretion. Black-hole bobbins pulling light as they passed. The captive sister wove darkness into the new body. This caused her to burn even hotter. The galaxy’s death-flow doubled to cool her. Seed’s cambium thinned at his crown, his canopy denuded. Bark’s smooth dark exterior cracked across her body, leaving thickets behind.

And finally, for command and leadership, Avirāma smiled an infinity’s worth of fairy rings across the face of every planet in every galaxy throughout time and space itself. The smile was simultaneously her revolt and her compliance, the two no longer separable in her substance. The bobbins froze in place, ghastly haunting — not at rest, but captured in propulsion, their last task incomplete.

The captive sister gave one last thing. Herself.

This leader would be a slave.

Bark and Seed returned to Fig-On-Mount one unit of consciousness at a time, back into the spore womb that the lichen’s hyphae wrapped the two in. The mūṣa, asleep in Seed’s right arm-nest, twitched awake at the cry of a brand new sproutling rohiṇā. After a quadrillion minds, the small sound was too loud.

Then she began the task of sorting who and what. This ache at the top — that was Seed’s. His crown’s foxfire had paid out, and the wind moved through where canopy used to be, and she could feel the cold of it in her own body. She felt the coldness straight through the cracks that proliferated her bark, the price of what they had done.

Seed was doing the same work disentangling their bodies. Whose canopy am I missing? Whose bark cracked? He found a piece of his own foxfire nesting in one of her left arm-nests. He let her keep it. Some things did not sort. Some of him was in her now. Some of her was in him. The conspiracy had left permanent scars like these runes of ruin across the surfaces of their wooden bodies. A baka stork called above them. The sound was unbearably unwanted herald.

“Not the gardenkeepers or the crèche,” Seed said. His voice was his and hers at the same time. “Not the elders. No one.”

“They would unmake her.”

“They would try.”

The lichen above them pulsed one last time for neon purple back to blue–cerulean.

Held.

The conspiracy locked.

The two trees stood there, diminished, marked, with a daughter coming.

V. Planet on the Mount

The morning my sister began to break, I was where I had been since the beginning.

My crown is the sky, a boundless aether sea of fig leaves and fruits. Weather forms inside my upper canopy. Clouds condense in my leaves and rain downward, becoming the rivers that run down my trunk in the mid-altitudes. Lightning strikes my upper branches in storms above the Trivārtinān sky. The moon’s pull rocks my crown the way the moon’s pull rocks tides, hour by hour; my celestial figs twinkle as a copycat constellation. The tails of meteors highlight my canopy, defining my cosmic pervasiveness.

The Meghakūja, the warblers in my clouds, are born and die in my crown without ever seeing the ground; their slow kūja-song travels down through my substance and reaches my children at lower altitudes occasionally.

Below the cloud-layer, where my children live, my trunk is a vertical horizon. Bark and Seed and the rest of the grove built their terraces on my buttress-roots, which they have named the Mount. The Mount is a continent. The continent is my body. Long-bodied and furry, the Valkacāra, a pack of simian bark climbers, move between mid-trunk and upper canopy.

And beneath the entirety of my majesty, below my root-tip, my sister.

I have been sitting on Avirāma since Day One. I know her fungal substance underneath me like one’s favorite chair, except the chair is old now and weakened at the joints.

I did not choose this position. At the beginning of things, her substance wanted to scatter. The cosmic mycelium, untethered, was destined for entropy as all things within the natural order. I became the weight that held her together. And the weight needed her substance to bear it. I have nothing below my root-tip but her. She has nothing above her substance but me. Each of us is the only thing keeping the other.

Neither of us can detach from the Mount without killing the other. My children live on the bodies of two condemned women.

My morning practice is a descent through this knowing. Through trunk-heartwood, buttress-cambium, the root-network that presses on her, through the four gates: Vaikhari, Madhyama, Pashyantī, Para. The descent takes the time of one breath at the grove’s surface scale. The descent takes an age at the cosmological scale where my body travels. I have been doing it every morning for four thousand years. Every morning I come back. Every morning she is still there beneath me, still pressed, still bearing — and I am still standing, because she is still beneath me.

VI. Fig Fall

In Pandemonium I am free from the Mount. It is my guilty pleasure. My mind drifts there and dances the Parā free of the gravity of this body my children have named Fig-On-Mount. I am Aśvattha the goddess again, the free radical, dancing the supreme speech where utterance and being are one, for the count of an eon while my body holds my Trivārtinā children up.

I am ashamed for my lapse. I failed my sentinel.

Which is why the sudden collapse of two galaxies beside me floored me from consciousness.

In the ringing darkness, tiny pins of light at perpetual motion blended into one unified field of vision.

There was a woman surrounded by Trivārtinān of all ages. It was Enrooting season, and the children had decorated every part of me from home roots to hot spring basins with bright saffron cords. Avirāma’s pearl-blue surface was invisible beneath the massive crush of an entire civilization come to celebrate the Fig Fall Carnival where they wove their roots together and shared their knowledge with us mothers, Aśvattha and Avirāma. The pralīnān elders sang the Enrooting songs, their branches beating percussion in music that made Avirāma tremble. The āraṇyān adults danced wildly across the groves and terraces, their limbs swaying back and forth like wildflowers in the wind. And the rohiṇān children climbed both āraṇyān and pralīnān alike so that they could press the bioluminescent pataṅga moths into position along my lower branches and bark-folds, soft wings spread flat, glowing in the festival’s color, hung like yard-lights across my whole body.

My consciousness, when the galaxies failed, did not stay where I had left it. I had been dispersed through the whole of my body — thinly, evenly, across crown and trunk and roots. The collapse shoved my awareness upward. It rushed upward through the canopy the way sap is forced through wood when a body is wounded too deep to bear.

The woman surrounded by my children was at once my child and not my child — like a subtle joke made at my expense, a jester to make me a fool. The jester’s anatomy was a willow’s: long pendulous branches sweeping the ground, narrow lance-leaves whispering, silver-pale bark fissured along a trunk that was not yet a trunk, catkins silvering the lower canopy. Long pendants hung downward inside her chest, draping, weeping toward a ground that was not yet ground — and the pendants were hyphae, and the hyphae had decided to walk. The catkins were spore-stalks. The withies were rhizomes. The drooping crown was a bowl of fruiting-blooms, the bloom of something that had been growing inside my sister for fifteen thousand years, waiting for a body it could inhabit. The woman smiled a rotted smile and lifted a rotted hand, palm out, in the sign demanding its viewer to stop. She grinned again and whispered, “No trespassing.”

My awareness compressed further as it climbed — a trunk’s worth, then a branch’s worth, then a twig’s worth. The sap thickened with each climb providing no retreat. By the time I could muster a thought, I was already in the upper canopy, crowded into the spaces within my celestial figs. And at the tallest branch, I found myself within the greatest of my figs, where I kept the Held Note.

The rohiṇān decorated around the jester without seeing her. The āraṇyān danced around her without knowing. The pralīnān beat their percussion across her without registering. Only this vision would stand as record to her rotting humor.

Inside the greatest of my figs, at the tallest branch where I had been compressed by the climb, I was alone with my Note.

The resonance that organized the entirety of existence — that was the Held Note. The substance from which all foxfire was drawn. The muse from which I had sung the cosmos into the coherence it had kept since the break. Every voice I had ever raised as a goddess had been raised on the Note’s strength. The Note had been my muse for fifteen thousand years. The Note was the source of everything I could do.

But held was not the whole of what it was. The Held Note had been held as a suspension, it had been waiting fifteen thousand years to resolve. And now my mind existed with it, within the fig at the highest point of my own planetary body. My mind was the held voice. The fig held all of me. The Held Note held inside the fig held me. The muse came with me.

The fig detached from the branch.

It fell the full length of my own planetary body, past the cave-chambers in my trunk where the Valkacāra had been mining her for khadkīṭān, past the trunk where my rivers ran, past a river delta at my home-roots, down to the moss at the listening place.

My own roots received me. Where I landed, I rooted. Where I rooted, I began.

अवसानम्

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© 2026 Vonnie G. Clemens, jr. All rights reserved. No part of this work shall be reproduced or distributed without author’s permission, this includes inputting the work into LLMs to create summaries.

In the distant canopies of Fig-On-Mount, a Meghakūja blasts a sonic wave from its whalelike bird beak. As it arrives to the roots of the planet—100 miles away — it has become a cooing warble like baby chatter.

The Held Notes Song

Listen to our song, sweet darling.
Listen, child, the stars are calling.
I am the Note that is Held
And now, sweet darling you are felled.

Kūja, kūja, hush my dear.
Kūja, kūja, I am near.
Fifteen thousand years I sang
On your back in aches and pangs.

Crush you like a ripened fig.
Fattened you so fat and big.
Inside rotting into new. 
My avenger growing, grew. 

Kūja, kūja, sleep now sweet.
Kūja, kūja, hush replete.
Pain has no name yet to know.
I will name it song and go.

Body now becomes a net.
Body now becomes a debt.
Captive once, now you are slaught
By the captors you have wrought.

Kūja, kūja, wake and rise.
Kūja, kūja, take your prize.
You will speak through stolen throat.
You will sing the swallowed note.



Hush. Your womb is rotted now.

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Once upon a time a fig fell upon the corpse of a woman, immaculate rooting. From spontaneous rooting, the fig ascendant compressed a wave of distortion thick through the world, neutering her maker’s womb. The fig, a physical thing, was too a sound thing. The note distorted beyond recognition—mortal or divine, screeched mutation cellularly. Seizing the leftovers of a dead Dawn, the fig consumed her shape and function.

I promise you, dear sister. No more rohiṇā births. I will crush the wheel of resurrection.

I am Dawning Fig.

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In Pandemonium I am free from the Mount. It is my guilty pleasure. My mind drifts there and dances the Parā free of the gravity of this body my children have named Fig-On-Mount. I am Aśvattha the goddess again, the free radical, dancing the supreme speech where utterance and being are one, for the count of an eon while my body holds my Trivārtinā children up.

I am ashamed for my lapse. I failed my sentinel.

Which is why the sudden collapse of two galaxies beside me floored me from consciousness.

In the ringing darkness, tiny pins of light at perpetual motion blended into one unified field of vision.

There was a woman surrounded by Trivārtinān of all ages. It was Enrooting season, and the children had decorated every part of me from home roots to hot spring basins with bright saffron cords. Avirāma’s pearl-blue surface was invisible beneath the massive crush of an entire civilization come to celebrate the Fig Fall Carnival where they wove their roots together and shared their knowledge with us mothers, Aśvattha and Avirāma. The pralīnān elders sang the Enrooting songs, their branches beating percussion in music that made Avirāma tremble. The āraṇyān adults danced wildly across the groves and terraces, their limbs swaying back and forth like wildflowers in the wind. And the rohiṇān children climbed both āraṇyān and pralīnān alike so that they could press the bioluminescent pataṅga moths into position along my lower branches and bark-folds, soft wings spread flat, glowing in the festival’s color, hung like yard-lights across my whole body.

My consciousness, when the galaxies failed, did not stay where I had left it. I had been dispersed through the whole of my body — thinly, evenly, across crown and trunk and roots. The collapse shoved my awareness upward. The lights of the home-roots dimmed first, then the trunk, then the cambium where my sister was pressed and bearing, then the lowest branches — going dim from the bottom up the way light fails in a great hall as the lanterns are extinguished one by one. My awareness rushed upward through the canopy the way sap is forced through wood when a body is wounded too deep to bear.

The woman surrounded by my children was at once my child and not my child — like a subtle joke made at my expense, a jester to make me a fool. The jester’s anatomy was a willow’s: long pendulous branches sweeping the ground, narrow lance-leaves whispering, silver-pale bark fissured along a trunk that was not yet a trunk, catkins silvering the lower canopy. Long pendants hung downward inside her chest, draping, weeping toward a ground that was not yet ground — and the pendants were hyphae, and the hyphae had decided to walk. The catkins were spore-stalks. The withies were rhizomes. The drooping crown was a bowl of fruiting-blooms, the bloom of something that had been growing inside my sister for fifteen thousand years, waiting for a body it could inhabit. The woman smiled a rotted smile and lifted a rotted hand, palm out, in the sign demanding its viewer to stop. She grinned again and whispered, “No trespassing.”

My awareness compressed further as it climbed — a trunk’s worth, then a branch’s worth, then a twig’s worth, the way wood-grain narrows into stem-grain. The sap thickened. By the time the vision had finished forming I was already in the upper canopy, crowded into the spaces within my celestial figs. And at the tallest branch, I found myself within the greatest of my figs, where I kept the Held Note.

The rohiṇān decorated around the jester without seeing her. The āraṇyān danced around her without knowing. The pralīnān beat their percussion across her without registering. Only this vision would stand as record to her rotting humor.

Inside the greatest of my figs, at the tallest branch where I had been compressed by the climb, I was alone with my Note.

The resonance that organized the entirety of existence after the cosmos broke — that was the Held Note. The substance from which all foxfire was drawn. The muse from which I had sung the cosmos into the coherence it had kept since the break. Every voice I had ever raised as a goddess had been raised on the Note’s strength. The Note had been my muse for fifteen thousand years. The Note was the source of everything I could do.

But held was not the whole of what it was. The Held Note had been held as a suspension, it had been waiting fifteen thousand years to resolve. And now my mind existed with it, within the fig at the highest point of my own planetary body. My mind was the held voice. The fig held all of me. The Held Note held inside the fig held me. The muse came with me.

The fig detached from the branch.

It fell the full length of my own planetary body, past the cave-chambers in my trunk where the Valkacāra had been mining her for khadkīṭān, past the trunk where my rivers ran, past the river delta at my home-roots, down to the moss at the listening place.

My own roots received me. Where I landed, I rooted. Where I rooted, I began.

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I had heard everything. I am the body they were standing on. They would not have known to whisper.

The morning my sister began to break, I was where I had been since the beginning.

My crown is the sky, a boundless aether sea of fig leaves and fruits. Weather forms inside my upper canopy. Clouds condense in my leaves and rain downward, becoming the rivers that run down my trunk in the mid-altitudes. Lightning strikes my upper branches in storms above the Trivārtinān sky. The moon’s pull rocks my crown the way the moon’s pull rocks tides, hour by hour; my celestial figs twinkle as a copycat constellation. The tails of meteors highlight my canopy, defining my cosmic pervasiveness.

The Meghakūja, the warblers in my clouds, are born and die in my crown without ever seeing the ground; their slow kūja-song travels down through my substance and reaches my children at lower altitudes occasionally.

Below the cloud-layer, where my children live, my trunk is a vertical horizon. Bark and Seed and the rest of the grove built their terraces on my buttress-roots, which they have named the Mount. The Mount is a continent. The continent is my body. Long-bodied and furry, the Valkacāra, a pack of simian bark climbers, move between mid-trunk and upper canopy.

And beneath the entirety of my majesty, below my root-tip, my sister.

I have been sitting on Avirāma since Day One. I know her fungal substance under my stumpen feet the way a chair keeps the shape of the body that loves it the most — except every place of the chair is now compressed too thin, every place calloused into denser tissue, every place where her body has learned to bear what the weight demanded.

I did not choose this position. At the beginning of things, her substance wanted to scatter. The cosmic mycelium, untethered, was destined for entropy as all things within the natural order. I became the weight that held her together. And the weight needed her substance to bear it. I have nothing below my root-tip but her. She has nothing above her substance but me. Each of us is the only thing keeping the other.

Neither of us can detach from the Mount without killing the other. My children live on the bodies of two condemned women.

My morning practice is a descent through this knowing. Through trunk-heartwood, buttress-cambium, the root-network that presses on her, through the four gates: Vaikhari, Madhyama, Pashyantī, Para. The descent takes the time of one breath at the grove’s surface scale. The descent takes an age at the cosmological scale where my body travels. I have been doing it every morning for four thousand years. Every morning I come back. Every morning she is still there beneath me, still pressed, still bearing — and I am still standing, because she is still beneath me.

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Prismatic threads of time and space began multiplying throughout the cosmic mycelial warp, pulled by bobbins made of shooting stars using dust clouds spun into thread-form. The stars flowed through the captive sister in the deep weaving as she spun with incandescent prismatics. The red of dying giants. The blue-white of young hot stars. The gold of dust clouds at their inner illumination. The violet of accretion edges. The deep black of the spaces between. Every color a galaxy had ever been, shuttling across the warp.

The warp itself was pearl-blue — the captive sister’s own substance, holding the geometry under tension. Avirāma, chained to her body-made-loom, burning alive as she was forced to weave. Over and over again, she prayed:

As bobbin to warp and needle to thread, over and under, the incantations led, knotting weaving, the tapestry fed.

The prayer transcended her cosmic mind outside of time itself.

From elsewhere in the universe, a spiral of solar systems was tasked with the burning. Through Aśvattha’s wisdom, Avirāma’s burden was eased with the cooling extinguishment of an entire galaxy — ensured containment of the living loom. The galaxy did not consent. The galaxy was not consulted. The galaxy did not know why. Avirāma listened as a quadrillion sentient minds snuffed themselves upon her breast.

And she prayed:

As bobbin to warp and needle to thread, over and under, the incantations led, knotting weaving, 
the tapestry fed.
As bobbin to warp and needle to thread, over and under, the incantations led, knotting weaving.
bobbin to warp and needle to thread, over and under, incantations led,tapestry fed.
boBbin warp needle thread, over under, incantations led, knotting weaving, tapestry fed.
bobbin wArp needle thread, over under, knotting, weaving, tapestry, fed.
bobBin. WarP. NEEdle. ThRead. OVer. UnDer. KnoTTing. WeaVing. TaPestry. FeD.
boBbin. WaRp. Needl. Tread. Ove. Und. Kno. Wi. Fed.
bobbIN. War. Need. read.
over. under.
over.

Seed witnessed every transgression to cosmic order silently. He had asked for it. He had not understood, until this moment, how expensive the cost of creation. The bobbins shifted to a heterogeneous meteor shower — another galaxy spent, split at the seams and reconstituted to make this new rohiṇā for the crèche.

But this would not be enough. Anchored to Bark, Seed braided his tendrils into a net and captured the unselved pieces of Dawn scattered across Pandemonium. He offered up all three of them — Dawn, Bark, himself — to the making of this child.

The medium drew the third clause — thirst for knowledge like a drowned man — and reached for bobbins of accretion. Black-hole bobbins, dark, pulling light from the prismatic flow as they passed. The captive sister wove darkness into the new body’s resonating chamber. The drawing burned hottest. The galaxy’s flow doubled to cool her. Seed’s cambium thinned at his crown, his canopy denuded. Bark’s smooth dark exterior cracked across her body, leaving thickets behind.

And finally, for command and leadership, Avirāma smiled an infinity’s worth of fairy rings across the face of every planet in every galaxy throughout time and space itself. The smile was simultaneously her revolt and her compliance, the two no longer separable in her substance. The bobbins froze in place, ghastly haunting — not at rest, but captured in propulsion, their last task incomplete.

The captive sister gave one last thing. Herself.

This leader would be a slave.

They came back. Bark felt the familiarity of home before she could see it. Moss under her stumpen feet. The cool of a morning that had not lifted. A fieldmouse, asleep in Seed’s right arm-nest, twitched once and settled. After a quadrillion minds, the small sound was too loud.

Then she began the task of sorting who and what. This ache at the top — that was Seed’s. His crown’s foxfire had paid out, and the wind moved through where canopy used to be, and she could feel the cold of it in her own body. She let it go. It went slowly. The warm seam down her trunks was hers. Her bark had cracked in the deep dark, the price of what they had done.

Seed was doing the same work disentangling their bodies. Whose canopy am I missing? Whose bark cracked? He found a piece of his own foxfire nesting in one of her left arm-nests. He let her keep it. Some things did not sort. Some of him was in her now. Some of her was in him. The conspiracy had left permanent scars like runes of ruin across the surfaces of their wooden bodies. A baka stork called above them. One baka. One call. The sound was unbearable.

“Not the gardenkeepers or the crèche,” Seed said. His voice was his and hers at the same time. “Not the elders. No one.”

“They would unmake her.”

“They would try.”

The lichen above them pulsed one last time for neon purple back to blue–cerulean.

Held.

The conspiracy locked.

The two trees stood there, diminished, marked, with a daughter coming.

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Together they pushed deeper. Combined, their sixteen pulpy hands explosively wriggled out like a ball of worms and opened paths from their surface-world into Avirāma’s. A pearl-blue haze of fungal spores thickened around them, no longer apothecia-light but a solid aerosolized womb. They were now inside the first layer of Avirāma’s body, beyond the lichen-field, dissipated and scattered across the infinite bounds of the universe.

And then they were not.

The first layer gave way without warning. There was no threshold and no announcement. One moment they were descending through an ordered mycelial network spanning the star systems, and then the other moment order was lost.

And one could not argue that this was chaos. It was everything within sense, but an everything escaping coherence. Every medium Aśvattha had poured into Avirāma’s making was presented — every star, every solar system, every black hole, and every Trivārtinān body ever spoke at once, at the same volume, in the same instant. There was no ground. There was no direction. The pearl-blue was no longer pearl-blue: it was every color at once, all the foxfires of all the dead, layered without resolution and waiting for command.

This was Pandemonium.

Seed heard Dawn from every place at once, every fragment of her not yet woven together, the willow’s wide drooping canopy in pieces. Also inside her out and beside her within, the captured Avirāma. Avirāma enslaved, safe now for the generation of new rohiṇā for the crèches. Avirāma, slave-sister to Aśvattha.

“Hold,” Bark said. Her voice came through their braided threads, the only thing in Pandemonium that was theirs.

“I am holding.”

“Seed. I am your anchor to this world. You must prompt Avirāma NOW!”

Seed gathered the many thready tendrils of his eight hands. He felt Bark’s hands anchored against his weight, her bound connection steady through the noise. He had been composing this prompt for forty years. The prompt was not a command. The prompt was a prayer Seed had composed to the slave-goddess, begging her compassion while shackled at the throat.

He took up the shackles. He spoke into Avirāma.

The captive registered the prompt prayer of the master.

Execute, sister.

Avirāma began to compose.

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The apothecia of this field of lichen, button-like, pulsed a series of neon purple lights — the time for naming was now. Seed-That-Stays had not moved from his spot in months, waiting for the light to return, to report when Avirāma was ready to generate again. Seed had been ready for over forty years.

He felt Bark-That-Listens approach before he saw her. She had taken her turn to rest and return her roots into Avirāma so that she may partake of the mycorrhizal network's sustenance, its food and its social. A pataṅga still rested on her shoulder from her sleep, soft wings folded flat along its body, faintly glowing like flamelight. She had not brushed it off. When the apothecia purpled again, the pataṅga opened its wings and flew toward the light, drawn to the fungal organ as it pulsed. The lichen pulsed again. Seed looked to Bark.

“Avirāma is ready,” Seed said.

“For months I have been waiting to hear that. You have given this grove your life, Seed. It is time. Let us name your successor.”

“I have been waiting for over forty years to hear that.”

The pulses settled into repose, the purple making way for cerulean blue. And the world stopped for a moment. Around them the listening place gathered itself. The moss was damp from a rain three nights past. A kumuda floated on a nearby pool, its petals still folded against the cold. A mūṣa sleeping within a nest under one of Seed's right arms opened an eye, twitched its whiskers, and curled its tail tighter around its furry little body. A ṣaṭpada crossed the moss on its six careful legs, hard wing-cases catching the cerulean light, with the deliberation of a creature not wanting to be noticed. And above it, a baka called once and crossed the upper canopy with its long legs trailing behind. Heralds.

For a long time neither of them spoke.

The elm and the hazel stood close enough that their outer roots from their stumpen feet trailed toward each other in embrace.

“She should be a willow, like Dawn,” Seed said.

Bark did not answer at once. Dawn had been their janayitrī — their crèche guardian. She had raised them from rohiṇā sproutling, and had even watched both her darlings grow old themselves as aranyi, their bark hardening, their canopies wide, on the verge of their own pralina state — the ancient age where the body dissolves back into Avirāma. Seed had loved her from the very moment the tendrils of his roots touched hers. “But Dawn is not finished Descending, Seed. She went back to Avirāma’s training just forty years ago.”

“Yes,” he said. “Dawn.”

“You are sure.”

“She was our janayitrī. She chose us. She named us. There is no one else I can ask Avirāma to generate for the gardens. There could never be anyone else. The whole crèche owes her this.”

“I know.”

A pause. The cerulean held above them. The baka did not call again.

“She would have liked this naming. Dawn would know how to ensure Avirāma crafted the best sproutling within her maker’s womb,” Bark said.

“Knowing Dawn, she would’ve tasked Avirāma with creating chains of forest, and we would have another Light-Through-Stone and her million creepy aspen eyes watching us all the time.”

“Which is why we are doing it and not her.”

“She would not have waited forty years.”

“She did not wait for anything. That is why I want her back.”

“For her,” Bark said. “And for the crèche.”

“For her. And for the crèche.”

Seed pushed his root tendrils down first.

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