Eggbug Writes

The following tale comes from parts some may consider less than civilized, though I would not count myself among such. When it comes to the definition, I’ve always thought culture and general interconnection between the peoples involved to count just as much as technological advances, if not even more so. Five mad geniuses in a manor could hardly be called a civilization unto themselves, after all, to say nothing of the things I could say about the Tower as a whole.
Nevertheless, this tale took me to the Northern expanses of the Pact of Krawgry (what used to be called Nakravia, in fact), and its compilation was thankfully relatively easy, thanks to ease of access to more direct sources than usual; Korve biology ensured that, rather than track down individual works, I could simply consult directly with the historians in question, old enough to be history all by themselves. Compiling the tales and making them match was closer to playing postman to said experts than I would usually like, but such is the pursuit of knowledge sometimes. All that was left after that was to scrape the biases off as best as I could.

Not every seed out there grows upon the earth. Some take root upon far more ephemeral soils, growing into far stranger saplings than you could imagine, though they are just as lively and beautiful as the rest.

Today, I’ll speak to you of a kind of seed that takes root on the very skies[1] themselves.

Only a very particular kind of plant could grow upon the great vault above, slipping roots between grains we could never hope to witness and anchoring itself to nothing in defiance of all we know. There is little that can water it when the skies have cleared, and even less sustenance spread across the clouds and winds, but it’s all there, and thus ripe for the taking, like rotting wood before a mushroom-to-be[2]. And much like said wood, it’s not just any sky that will let such seeds embed and thrive. No, lively skies above lively lands don’t allow such things, the seed would still and remain there, or even die, outlasted… But if it finds even the slightest purchase, even just one patch of sky above a single horizon, there it shall thrive, and spread roots far and wide to claim the rest. It only takes one root to churn the soil, after all.

But like any seed, it cannot travel by itself. Either the tree that bore it, or the wind and tides, or the beasts that lived off its fruit must deliver it to fertile grounds, and even such things can only take it so far. You would then expect a forest, growing from the inside out, slowly claiming sky after sky, those just close enough to touch. And perhaps somewhere, in a place so far you and I shall never see, this is so. But not here. There is no such forest in sight from where we stand, no fallen husks of leaves that couldn’t take, no distant rustle of leaves to hear. Nothing of the sort. Perhaps it’s because these seeds are rare by themselves, or perhaps it takes too many lifetimes for one to bear more seeds. Or perhaps there are far too many skies that yet see life, surrounding and smothering the lone trees. But as far as we have witnessed, there is no such forest.

What we have seen, however, is a Gardener[3].

There needn’t be a seed of this kind to sap a sky, many places simmer so low all by themselves. And so, someone with a great handful of such seeds could set off into the distance, sift the myriad lands, even those that will never see each other if they could traverse the right paths, and find these weakened places ripe to become soil. And yet where you’d expect the seed to be planted and simply left there, allowed to become a forest over the coming eons, this is not so, either. The Gardener doesn’t seek to start new forests all over creation, after all. The Gardener has a Garden, obvious as it sounds, and they wish to add another eventual bloom, eventual tree to it, even as they know it will take a long time for it to grow.

There is a method to it, though. Much like soil without a plant, these worlds[4] are loose, and come apart easily without anything to connect them and hold them together; their own innate unity isn’t enough to keep them whole if someone like the Gardener stuck their talons into it, the grains of being parting ways from one another at the slightest touch. The Gardener knows this, and they know just how helpful roots can be in curbing this little problem, too; moving a plant alone can kill it, and the soil alone would come apart if shifted even slightly, but the whole, combined, that can be dug out and carried anywhere with little fuss. Thus, it becomes clear that one must grow the plant first, and only then think about carrying the whole to a proper garden.

And so the Gardener prowls the lands with a map of their own, dotted with every seed they’ve ever planted out in the open. With a date on every dot they plan their route, watering and trimming what they cannot yet extract, until they find the treasured plant that is finally big and healthy enough to claim. With the work of a few moments, then, the plant, the sky that formed its soil, and so much of the realm that formed the undersoil all come loose into their hands, and are taken away where none of us can ever hope to see. And it’s only with the furthest of sights that one can see other such lands, let alone the one burying the seed that’d doom them to the Garden in time, so all one can do is wonder where they all go…

How would it all look, you may ask, standing down under one of those seeded skies?

You wouldn’t know. Not at first. These plantings, they’re events well beyond the sight of most people, so vast and ethereal one cannot witness them with simple eyes like yours or mine. But there are signs, still, if you do have the methods… or if you’re lucky. Or unlucky, perhaps. For you see, in planting the seed, the Gardener must make a breach, poke a hole into the topsoil of a place’s existence, disturb it and pierce the thin veil[5] that keeps it separated from the rest. And if you wander enough, you don’t need eyes to find the hole to the outside, and perhaps walk right out of the world the way the seed came in. Be wary, you don’t know what lies outside, and if you leave, you may not find your way back… If you get past the things that crawled in.

The seed itself, however, you won’t find it by merely wandering. Not the way you or I would wander, at least. It will be neatly lodged in the horizon, unreachable to those who don’t know how to get there, and it will take its time to bud. Not too long, as the Gardener knows the right conditions, but for things like these, a whole lifetime is on the quicker end. And unless you’ve reached it, you will not ever see it.

But you will, one day, see its roots break through the realm. They will not be roots you recognize, no strands of green and brown to snake through the skies. Ethereal seeds have ethereal roots, and their sustenance is rarefied to match. They may feed on the very light itself, turning the world dark, or latch onto the patterns, turning a mere monsoon into a storm that never ends. They will sap fundamental things from the sky and the air, throwing the realm beneath into chaos, tying its fate together to the rest, dragging them all into one singular ending as doom comes from above in one form or another…

Until one day, the sky seems gone. And all you see is soil where the celestial vault once was. Because that’s what it is, now, soil for a seed and nothing else, the detritus drifting to the bottom and settling right above you while the rest of the sky right above it, beyond your sight, is slowly eaten away…

And when the roots are steady, and the sapling firm, the realm entire shall be dug up, and taken to the Garden to join so many others. To become part of just one whole, as written by its Gardener.

And life goes on. Those who survive will be changed by the experience, and by whatever follows, but some always survive. Even thrive, at times. There are ways to trim the roots, and the seed won’t always take, but the Gardener will always return, and the Garden is vast and varied, so they will always find a way, in time. And for every soil, there’s a root that’ll take in it.

Perhaps, one day, when the world is old enough, you will see them too.

[1]While exact ages have been near-impossible to discern, this is naturally a pre-Refuge story. The Korves’ previous realm is known to have been (and likely still is) particularly open, with nothing in the way of ceilings and little in the way of the emptiness above their heads going on into apparent perpetuity. This is what they, and we, call a sky, though the terms my sources used could vary in trying to dubdivide the infinity above them into distinct pieces, which some used almost interchangeably.
[2]Unlike the fungal timber we know, the Realm’s “wood” instead came from trees of the sort that grow in the light; certain sources insisted in comparing, too, calling said wood far less spongy but also less colorful, and far more vulnerable to fungal infections thanks to not being fungi in the first place.
[3]A very precisely-picked word when taken from the original Korve, as they make distinctions between different kinds of cultivators. Some merely spread the wilderness as is while they plant, which is common, but Graw Arry, or Gardeners as I choose to translate it, are those who outright cull plants they don’t desire in favor of others, and often “mutilate” those they do want (as one fairly old Korve put it) in order to give them forms they prefer. I know the description sounds more negative than they (seemingly) meant it to be, which is why I left it at Gardener instead of something more pointed.
[4]The wording here between realm and world was surprisingly vague. Sometimes one got the feeling the historians meant “region” instead, with clear separation but no clear barrier between them. It made distinction between different skies muddled, and a little maddening in places, but whenever I prodded them on this, they just declared that was how it went, with little elaboration. Thus, in the interests of fidelity I would keep it vague myself, to my chagrin.
[5]Another bit of vagueness here, in that some resorted to words closer to “spiderweb” instead. All my sources used words that’d imply a flimsy, flexible barrier, but had nothing to elaborate on it beyond speculation on where it came from. The main points of agreement were that it was there, and that it separated an inside from an outside.

-Excerpt from “Who is the Lord Below? A Treatise on the Radiant and Cthonic”, authored by ‘the Ever-Restless Nirrhamidh’ (confirmed pseudonym; author not yet identified and under active investigation)