The Wound

The canopy is a lie told by the light. Above ground, the forest is war – a thousand crowns tearing skywards, each shadow a blade against the tree beneath. Below ground, in darkness no eye has mapped, lines lose meaning. Roots do not stop where one tree ends. They trespass. They braid. They press together in the dark – root entering root, vessel fusing with vessel, until their sap runs as one. When the axe bites one trunk, a tremor threads through the soil, faster than the blade can fall. Below ground, the forest has only one body.

The Path

All your life, you have lived in the canopy, hoarding light, cursing the shadows that fall across your leaves. Then light fails. Drought comes. Your roots reach down, expecting solitude. They find water already flowing – through vessels not your own. Beneath the war you wage, your roots made peace long ago. They crossed into the soil of what you call enemy. You drink their water. They drink yours. You cannot unbraid what thirst has woven. The roots found each other before you declared war. You can only stop pretending you ever stood alone.

The Shadow

Some roots refuse the braid. The Amber-Hearted coils her roots inwards, refusing every offered vessel. Why dilute my sap with foreign water? She watched her mother braid with a neighbour's roots – and watched the season the neighbour's blight came through, her mother's leaves yellowing with borrowed grief. For a season, her sap runs thick. She grows faster than the braided trees, unburdened by their shared loads. Then the sap slows. Then – stops. What was meant to flow hardens to resin; what hardened to resin thickens to amber. The water she needed was never a private well. It was the river that moves between roots she called strangers. She stands upright still – gleaming, and no longer alive. ⧫ The Coiled Root refuses not from greed, but from disgust. The intimacy appalls her: their failures seeping into her heartwood, their sorrows darkening her rings. She wants a life that is only hers. She draws her roots into a fist. When another root brushes hers in the dark, she flinches. When the network hums with some distant tree's distress, she walls it off. One dry summer, she reaches deep and finds nothing. Around her, the trees who braided are passing water root to root – an underground river she refused to join. She sends out one tendril, finally. It touches the network – and recoils. The water there is too mingled. She cannot tell whose is whose. She dies of thirst in soil that keeps drinking without her. Above ground, a dead trunk in a living forest. Below, the roots she refused in life are the only things still holding her upright.

The Cut