The Verdwelling

Excerpt from the private correspondence logs of Arch Scholar Anneas, Lacliosan Postal Archive, South Annex, Shelf 23-F ("Unsent / Unlabeled")   "I found it nestled among mold-wrecked invoices and a letter to a chicken, gods help me. No return sigil, no binding glyph, no proper address. Just bark glue and heartbreak.   The handwriting was unfamiliar. The paper was leaf-pulp, the kind Verdwelling use when they can’t afford silk-vine sheeting. And the smell—honeyrot and river musk.   I don’t know who Hush was. Or where Crackle Grayspine ended up. But I’ve copied the letter below, against regulation, because something in it hurt. Like old roots moving in my chest.   If either of them ever comes looking... gods, if anyone ever comes looking... tell them it was beautiful. And it almost made it."

  Rustle of Tarn, sent from the mouth of the Wandering River, sealed in bark glue and memoryfruit dye   Hush—   I dreamed of the grove again.   Not the grove as it was at the end, with the screaming bark and the hunger rising up through the soil. Not that night. I dreamed it before. You and I in the shadow of the tallest root-pillar, trading silence and sun between us. You wove me a petal crown. I was so still it thought I was soil.   I miss being soil.   The caravan’s headed north now. The humans here don’t notice when I bloom. That’s something. I’ve found a place under an old aqueduct—stone cracked just wide enough for an echo-garden. I’ve planted hushbells and threadroot. I carved our names in the gutwood reliquary, though I don’t know if it’s still legal. I don’t care. If they bury me, let me rot honest.   Do you still carry your seeds? Have they changed shape? Mine hum sometimes. One tried to sprout while I was sleeping.   I heard whisperroot has started growing again in the Unnamed. But they say it speaks in backwards voices now. Some fools think we could go back. That we could replant. But we were never supposed to stay planted, were we?   You told me once that food grown by others tastes like story. You were right. I’ve been living off cabbage from a dwarf’s rooftop garden. I cried the first time I ate it. Felt like laughter and rain.   Find me, if you can. My leaves are red now. I’ve started blooming when I think of you.   —Crackle Grayspine (still yours, even scattered)  

Excerpt from The Verdwelling: Societies of Living Plants, Volume II, authored by Scholar Timbristle of Adrea   "Verdwelling are a migratory species of sentient plantfolk believed to originate from the deep roots of the Unnamed. While their precise taxonomy eludes scholars—many refuse classification entirely—their forms often resemble bipedal amalgams of bark, vine, petal, and spore. No two are exactly alike.   Historically, the Verdwelling lived communally in a singular mythic grove, rarely venturing far from its bounds. However, following the Cataclysm, the grove reportedly collapsed or consumed itself, driving the Verdwelling into diaspora.   They are now found singly or in small, wandering clusters. Each carries with them ‘gutwood reliquaries’—carved seed-holders believed to contain ancestral memory or fragments of the grove itself.   Though slow to trust, Verdwelling are deeply spiritual, often cultivating secret gardens or embedding memories in grown fruit. To eat one is to glimpse another’s soul."