story • short
The telling of this story was reconstructed the morning after a tea party hosted by Space Grandma that carried on through to sunrise. We have used the exact words where remembered, and flavored any small gaps as they appeared in the writing.
It is a tale of and by Vrae ElnoAdi: recovering melancholeric, endurance researcher, stringer correspondent,
amateur mineral mason and chemist, and Wyrmroot purveyor.
“Well, I’ll tell you what happened. I’ll tell you.”
And Vrae paused. Right at the story’s start. A long pause, no doubt tapping the deep roots of his memory - a saying more than metaphor here, as Vrae is a hume of Oraea and they are known for the tree-like organisation of their minds.
His long fingers wrapped and tapped again and again around the color-coded cup given him by my friend Space Grandma. Dawn’s first rays plucked at the hill crests. Just as my impatience pricked, wondering whether this wandering hume’s gaze had somehow drowned in the tisane he'd been staring at, he spoke.
His voice was quiet, sturdy, though it would become cracked as bark by story’s end.
“Wyrmroot grows, and only grows, on Yorok - that’s ‘yore-OHK’, not ‘yore-OKE’ - the sole intact moon of my birthplanet Oraea. Our expeditions tthere began just two generations ago: small transient crews with an interest is to understand, of course, not to occupy. It is a treeless place of tireless wonder — especially the wonderous root that grows there, this root that… that can keep you moving.
"That can… keep you.”
Vrae lifted the cup. A gentle inhale of the tisane. As if, to me anyway, to confirm it was not wyrmroot. Which it was not. “All this happened before I left the Pleiades for good, you understand.” No one said they did not. He sipped.
“I was born between sea and an ever-shifting forest that covers a continent. Mine was a strange birth, and it fascinated me from the first with my body's potentiality.. When it became clear that no body was quite like my body, or anybody else’s for that matter - and that this would, ah, of course only become more so the more we each lived our own lives - I became a kind of… an obsessive. To test my own body.
I ran beach trails to start, climbed the ever-tangling trees, skipped most classes for most of my life that weren’t about biology, chemistry, mineralogy, or a physical life. Never visited a tradeport longer than the time it took to pass through and admire the view, always criss-crossing forests and the continent, always moving; running, climbing, failing, founding Guilds, designing tests, researching techs - all to maximise a hume’s organic capacities. This was my interest. Sometimes my love.
“One midsummer's eve, still early enough in my young life that I was not yet rooted on a personal path, I pushed far too hard and collapsed in a hallucinatory daze on the edge of an engineering camp at the heart of a small desert. Someone found me there, and I slipped into a feverish drift.
"Except, when the visions faded under Yorok’s auroric light, the nurse of my night remained in reality. In shock that she was not a dream I tried to sit up, but I was so exhausted I only sort of twitched vertically before I collapsed again. When I awoke, and she was gone, I - I was relieved if you can believe it.
"Relieved that I wouldn’t have to leave everything to be with her. If she were real, then I would. It was… the simplicity scared me. So I accepted that I had dreamed within dreams, and those chill moments after dawn were waking reality.
"But then, just a little later that day, I found her.
"Sweat shining on her shoulders, curious gaze bright as the sun above, real as I’d ever known myself to be. Her born and borrowed names were Alat nen Jahji Zoz [a-LAHT nehn JA-zhi ZOHZ], and just like that our journeys joined.
“On Oraea, humes long ago organised in a way we call ‘neuradventitious’ - named after a certain root structure - and the AdventiNeura Communication System now spans our biosphere. Communities put out calls for collaboration, replies return, and we connect. This System makes meaning clearer by nature, and makes the technical act of communication easier, but on the interpersonal scale that act remains an art. Hume to hume to hume, it’s on each of us to ask and to hear. Every generation brings new humes who bring new chemistries, new adaptations to Life. The art remains evergreen, even as we weep our own leaves for what we leave unsaid or undone.
“When the port of Clavec put out its planet-wide Community Call for collaboration on a wholescale refresh of their wastewater gardens, this time incorporating mechanical plants which the waters would flow through, we answered together. I found… just due to a life lived mostly in motion and often on the edges… I found challenges with some of the adjustments, the kind asked by any community, no matter how loosely organised.
"Clavec was a port amongst ports, if you can imagine, where there were almost… almost… oh, a dear Optometrical Geometricist friend of mine of those days used the word ‘Interseconsentrics’ - that's in-ter-SEK-con-SEN-triks. Picture a circle. Okay. Imagine a circle bisecting that circle. Imagine another circle bisecting that circle. And another, and another, and so and on and so and on. You already may no longer know which circle I’m talking about, or who has bisected with whom. It doesn’t matter, since soon every circle is somehow layered through every other. Now imagine every circle is a life, is the shared universe as rooted to a single life. In market ports like Clavec, for the unadjusted - meaning anyone who feels they still have wild open spaces between their cells - this same tapestry of connection that opens up life for some can, for others, like me, become a kind of encagement.
“I couldn’t hold my own place anymore, not with her projects or my own. I didn’t say anything, of course, only worked harder. With her on the creative mechanics of the gardens, with myself on the move. No matter how fast I went, no matter who I helped or how, there was a…
"I had - we had - a path, built with pieces we’d both brought, suddenly more stable than I’d even thought my life could ever be.
“Different parts of my body began to freeze. Sieze up. Panic. Spit back at me in pain. I pressed on, worked less but harder when I could work. We picked out the home we would renovate for our own. We began to plan. We built the beginning of a future together. But we didn’t really know how to be together. Or I didn’t, anyway, know how to be. With her. With anyone, really. Which I didn’t know I didn't know. Which I doubt I could have accepted if I had known. At any rate, I didn’t, and all I knew how to do was move. By the time I began to reveal hints of how deep the roots of some of my unhappiness went, in my head I was already gone. My heart was warming up. My legs were stirring. By the time I began to glimpse her own unhappinesses, and my parts in them, my heart was confused but running, not daring to look back and barely succeeding.
“As soon as the first expeditions to Yorok began, I mumbled my goodbye and left for those rough early days of experiment on fresh frontiers.
"I thought the things I knew how to do required me to make my focus and freedom fully available for any possibility required by discovery. Had to be ready, to think I was ready, for whatever came. That was my path, the path I thought I knew, the one where I thought was right for me to grow. I sometimes wonder if this all was also thanks to some more perverse corner of me wanting to test my endurance on other levels. In the wilds of emotion or psychology. Of my sub and unconscious.
"Perhaps. Could be.
“Several seasons on Yorok took me farther and farther afield as we first hume explorers became extremophiles. We knew each other, came back season after season. And it, it really wasn’t long at all before there were nine permanent research stations and a biannual theatre festival. I really got out there. Into the… fields of geology, moving tall under a close black sky overbrimming with stars. Along subterranean rivers with crystal banks, my body fueled by new minerals, ingredients, concoctions. I was getting somewhere. There was so much new to discover. Wyrmroot was just one more wonder, initially rare enough that I didn’t bother to notice it. When great supply was finally discovered, and conscientious gathering methods applied, wyrmroot did more than enter the scene; it took over the stage and wrote its own eight act musical saga. It’s the… the taste, yes, but the also the beauty of the plant itself. And the way it awakes the cells.
“Here we come to another of those 'interseconcentrics' - albeit one in the wider dimension of loops that connect our roots and blooms through time and space. Maybe call it an… an int… an intersec-connect-centricity. This plant was for my path. It joined me, and we - we moved. Began to really get somewhere. One day, halfway through a journey, that 'somewhere' was a new pop-up tisanehouse visiting Yorok station by station. The whole thing was engineered to open and close the way wyrmroot itself lives and grows, which is a fabulous… there’s this flower, and -
“Anyway.
“There she was.
“She poured me her own wyrmroot brew; a replenishment for the paths of the journey to come. We sipped and talked about life that had been. About life that was, and what life even might be, and I don’t remember exactly how it happened but I said something like… I had never realised she would be interested in this life.
"She said: 'you never asked.'
"The shame that swelled in me came suddenly. It swallowed me totally, in a way I’d never known a feeling could. Even if I’d been brave enough to speak, I felt physically unable. My throat was… this body of mine was one well used to pain. This was a truly new pain, hot and swollen, right at the root of my throat.
“My eyes dropped back down to the cup. The liquid was a dull gold.
"There was a last sip left. And I…
"I didn’t want to finish it.
"I didn’t want to finish it."
