Chapter 55 – The Roots Beneath (Part 1)

There was a silence that lingered, oppressive. Not one following words which are lost, but the one that had hung like a weight, smothering all idea so Yusuf did not know if his own mind would be able to levelling under weight.

The Guardians had left him. With mercy or with indifference, he could not tell. Their immense dark figures melted into thin air, leaving only the memory of their bulk before his eyes. He had fought them, endured their trial, but victory was a hollow thing. All his body ached with fatigue. His arms shook as if he were again a child, struggling to lift books too great for him.

And in his chest, the Codex pulsed. Not as a book, not as parchment and ink—but as a second heartbeat. Each beat was full of memory, scraps of names, words not his own but alive within him now. Breathing was hard.

He stumbled forward, boots scunching on not-terrain. The nothingness had grown deeper. Needles of twisted bark and ghost wood stabbed the infinite dark, up to nothing, down to nothing. Their tips shone dimly with light, like veins with sap of star-stuff.

"This is the Root," said the faceless child.

Its voice had grown more distinct. Still boy and not-boy sound, but polished, like the edges of words were cutting through fog. Yusuf turned around, and for the first time he saw something else. The kid's mask—the smooth, featureless oval that had tortured him from the beginning—proved itself. For half a breath, lines etched themselves onto its surface: the shadow of an eye, the suggestion of a mouth, too brief to be certain.

Yusuf's muscles braced. "What was that?"

The child tilted its head. "What was what?"

"Your face." His throat was dry, but the necessity sliced through it. "It near—"

He swallowed what he had to do.

The child's shape changed, formless, neither refusing nor confirming. "The Root makes a difference," it said. "The Root shows what is concealed. The Root shows what is denied.".

A shiver crept down Yusuf's back. He wanted to ask her more questions, but the questions stuck in his throat. Always something else. Something else.

They walked.

The planet was bumpy, a root-and-branch matrix of hills surfacing in crazy ways, folding back upon themselves, springing from nowhere, passing over the tree again at impossible elevations. Sometimes Yusuf imagined he went downward, then sideward, then upwards, but his form remained unchanged. His belly churned.

Memories stuck to the road. Not his, not in any integral way, but remnants of worlds welded onto the rootstock like excrescences. A streetlamp glowing over wet cobblestones. Laughter, a woman's, echoing without reason. A battlefield, sealed in control, the soldiers stiff, suspended in amber. Yusuf slowed before one: a child's bedroom, cluttered with toys, with furniture, even with the smell of paper and dust. But when he touched it, he could pass through. The entire scene was vacant, a remembrance stuck like an insect in glass.

The Codex pulsed against him. Yusuf looked down. The pages twitched on their own, carrying trails of ink that curled and overlapped, words he could not trace.

Elarra — unfinished.

Shard restored.

Names disappearing.

He slammed it shut, the sound too brutal against the silence.

"I can't—" He banged his fist against his lips, turning his head. "I can't keep losing them like this."

"They are already lost," the shadow child answered. Not ungraciously, not cruelly. Merely a statement. "You only walk among their shadows."

Yusuf's throat closed. He would have protested, would have screamed, but nothing came. Instead, he pushed on, inch by agonizing inch along the untravelled rootways.

At times the air about him shuddered. He caught Rae's name whispered—just a syllable, just an echo—but when he turned, no one was present. The child did not stir.

Minutes perhaps passed. Or hours. Or centuries. Time here held no gravity.

Then the Codex altered again. Not just pages ripping, but waves of heat emanating outward. Yusuf cried out and nearly let it go as streams of ink unspooled onto the page without his hand.

The letters were trembling, mad.

Yusuf. Archivist. Broken vessel.

He panted. "What—"

The words bled on, as if written by a thousand hands simultaneously.

You are not reading. You are being read.

He staggered, gripping the Codex tight. “No. No, this is wrong. You’re just a book—you’re supposed to be—”

The child’s head turned, slowly. “Not just a book. Never just a book.”

The ink writhed across the page, shaping into something Yusuf couldn’t deny: his own name, written over and over until the letters bled together. Then, smaller script below:

Fragment of self. Bound to memory.

Yusuf's knees shook. He leaned against the root, bark burning his back, Codex heavy on his lap. He remembered his father's words, so many years ago: You think remembering will be enough, Yusuf. But memory outside of love is only a list of names.

Had he done it to himself? Tied his very soul into parchment, into ink, into a form that would endure beyond him but never live?

The boy stepped nearer. "Do you see now?"

He was unable to speak. His heart pounded in his ears.

"Do you understand what you have?"

The Codex glowed again, and Yusuf felt he could feel it beat to the rhythm of his own.

He pulled himself up, his hands trembling. "It does not matter," he said to it. "Even if it is part of me. Even if I am nothing. I can still harvest what I can."

The child remained motionless. Its head was tilted, its in-face-against-us flashing again, like a face out of focus.

And then things changed.

The Root sensed him.

They all shook. Memories that clung to them shuddered, cracked, re-bonded. The vacuity that clung to them thicken with a murmur, a sound beneath vibration, vibrating his marrow. Before him, the trunk of the Tree parted like a door—not a crack, not a tear, but an opening. A swelling bark door, folding in upon darkness.

His hand was gripped by the child's. Cold. Small. Resolute.

"It's calling," the child whispered. "The Root is calling you."

And before Yusuf could protest, the earth heaved up under their feet. Roots curled around, pulling them along with them to the opening, pulling them down into the heart of the Tree.

The last thing Yusuf saw of what lay beyond was the spectral outline of Rae's signature, penned across the margins of the Codex, fading like a star dying.