How Does 'Fucked The World Tree' End?

Pure mayhem, all emotional. Best way to end it off. The World Tree is NOT just the backdrop for all of this to happen. It is in fact a major character and you watch as the WORLD TREE'S FATE is unravelled before your eyes.

The climax of the book is so beautiful, it makes me cry every time. So Veyra finally makes it to the core of the Tree after all that time and suffering and manipulation. And to the reader’s surprise, the Tree isn’t some all-powerful, wish-granting entity. It’s a prison for something far older and far more malevolent. And Veyra discovers that the whole time, the Tree was manipulating him to break free. So Veyra makes the decision to ‘fuck’ the Tree, severing the roots from the Tree with his own hand. The visuals are insane – sap pours out of the Tree like blood, and branches collapse into dying light galaxies. It’s a complete and utter annihilation of both the protagonist and the World Tree.

What really gets to me is what comes after. As it turns out the world isn’t fixed up nicely for all of our heroes. Veyra returns to a world of ruins, and of the people she cared about most, some are long dead while others will hate her for destroying their god. The ending is really stark and involves Veyra holding a single Tree seed in the midst of all of that, looking defeated. He seems to realize that he may have changed things, but nothing much will be different in the long run. He’s pretty disappointed, which is sort of a relief from an otherwise amazing ending.
I don’t get any moral answers or anything, and it’s really okay with me that I’m left with nothing. It’s all just really raw and feels really complete, even though it was kind of ambiguous. The ending really screws with me every time I read it, even to the point of tears. The last line of the book goes something like, “Roots grow in the shape of scars,” and makes me cry every time.

The ending is a very direct deconstruction of the ‘Chosen One’ narrative. Arin is prophesied to be the one to ‘heal’ the Tree. She goes on the quest, collects all the necessary items, goes through all the tests. And then, at the one point where she could ‘heal’ the Tree, she reads from the script and says ‘no’. The Tree doesn’t get healed. In fact, it gets euthanized. The entire kingdom wasn’t saved by Arin, the kingdom has to save itself. And instead of getting crowned, Arin the Chosen One gets exiled. Every single plot point that one expects to be fulfilled by the end of a typical heroic fantasy is subverted. Whether that is somehow refreshing or infuriating depends on how locked into typical story structures one is.

Rather than what I had imagined to be a finally cerebral showdown with the Tree, the climax of the game (final section shown above) is instead set in an endless, featureless white space and is comprised of a wearied, age-old manifestation of the Tree engaging in a psychological debate with none other than Arin herself. They resolve the matters of purpose, of pain, and of existence in a series of deeply philosophical and ideological confrontations. All action in the climax is ideological in nature, and in the end, it is simply a matter of Arin granting a wish to her own reflection: that of bringing an end to her own endless, and extraordinarily painful existence. That it is so profoundly avant-garde for a series which had, at that point, featured a host of sword-based battles will no doubt generate as much love for this ending as there will be for it being completely and utterly (and unbearably pretentious) incomprehensible. I personally happen to fall into the first category of thought. The ending is incredibly cerebral and prioritizes intellectual resolution of conflict over physical action and/or Francountry burp-based victory.