Rootbound

The morning the Root chose Eli began with the thin blue light that always came after rain, the kind that turned the cracked clay paths to silver and made the fungal mats along the settlement’s foundations glisten like wet coins. People gathered in the plaza with the cautious reverence of long practice: not exactly celebration, never exactly mourning. The Root-house, a squat, ribbed building half-sunk into the earth, hummed underfoot. You felt it before you heard the low voice—an almost-musical vibration that threaded through shoes and bones and made children press their hands to their ears and elders close their eyes and remember.

Mara stood at the edge of the crowd and watched her brother move like he always had when songs circled him—slower, as if learning notes from the air. Eli had the thin, wasted look of the harvest years pressed into adolescence: his cheekbones too sharp, his hands too delicate for the work the settlement demanded. He clutched the little carved whistle their mother left with them, a thing of bent copper and salt stains. It had been a thing for carrying tunes; now she thought of it as something the Root might read and fold into itself.

When the Rite began, faces above the plaza turned to the fissured stone where the Warden would stand. Joss Marek’s voice found space and tidy courage; he said the words they had all learned, the words that acknowledged debt and survival. Mara could see him counting heads under the hood, watching for more than ceremony—always the man who measured each sacrifice against the fragile order he had to hold. He had been the one to lead them through the year the fungus failed in three outlying beds and crops died in the cold. He had kept the fire, and for that people listened.

They performed the songs—low, braided chants that were part prayer, part calibration—anchors in the old melody. Eli sang with a voice that barely vibrated, but that buzzed in the Root’s hum like a new thread being tested. When the Warden stepped forward and declared the selection, the words landed like a stone. Mara felt something inside her fold and go brittle. Her mother’s face rose up uninvited, the way it did when a scent or a note found an old wound. The memory of the Anchor’s last morning—of the way her mother’s eyes had gone quiet behind the Root’s hush—knifed through her.

She remembered the stories the Warden never told at length: how Anchors kept communities from choking on the old airborne salts and spores, how they bridged the Root’s pattern to human minds and stabilized its rhythms. Anchors returned little of what they took. They came back altered, interpolated with memories that were no longer wholly theirs: a dignity bought with halves of selves. Mara had watched one Anchor die slow with the Root’s slow echo, felt the way a person could be present and absent at once. That absence lived in Mara’s bones the way the Root lived underfoot, an ache that did not let her look away.