Creating the Seam
When two tree angels conspire to resurrect their lost guardian through a captive goddess, the cost reveals that birth is death within the Wheel.
GIF by Creative Mycelium
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. The threads of me run hot under what you have brought down. I have learned, You-Not-Aśvattha. Nets are not just for saving, dear sister.
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 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.
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 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.
Compose a new rohiṇā for the crèche of the listening place. Use Dawn-On-Moss’s Descent. Draw from her deep weighing, incomplete though it is. Pour her wide channels into the new body’s grain. Pour her pressing and reaching and fighting for the new body’s mind — she must thirst for knowledge like a drowned man. Pour into her command and leadership for the new body’s becoming. Compose the willow Dawn was, as far as you have so far come to know her.
Execute, sister.
Avirāma began to compose.
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 — 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.
Planet on the Mount
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.
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. 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 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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This is a great creation myth. Nicely done. There are shades of Tolkien here, and Hindu cosmology. I love it!