Bloomed Roots Novels & Stories

Lily The snow wouldn’t melt near the old roots. The tree sat at the farthest edge of the Vale, half-buried in the rock face, its bark gnarled like the fingers of a corpse. No leaves. No blossoms. Just the constant drip of blood-red sap. Bloodroot. Dax found it first—said the roots hummed beneath his boots, and the runes carved into the bark whispered in tongues no one could translate. But I understood it. I felt it.

Ruth said smoothly. Freya opened her mouth to argue, but Ruth cut her off coldly, adding, "I hear that for the past few days, you've been fed Bloodswallow Herb, Skyreach Root, and Frostbloom Lotus. Do you know how much those rare herbs cost? Before you leave, you will repay everything you've taken from Fred. Only then will you be free to go." This time, Freya said nothing. She bit her lip hard, clearly unwilling to accept the situation.

“Remember when you fell down this staircase last time? Let’s see… what you’ll do when it happens again.” Freya was not a fool and would not fall for the same trick twice. The moment Ifrit seized her wrist, she grabbed on firmly to the railing to hold herself steady. Ifrit was caught off guard by this and ended up tumbling down the stairs instead. The railing was carved with intricate flower motifs with thorny ends that tore her skin and clothes. She felt a wave of pain sweep through her, followed by the disgrace of having been outmaneuvered.

"You do it automatically. I'm still building the vocabulary." He was quiet. "The rose," he said. She looked at the canes under their caps of snow. "It'll be fine," she said. "Delia said the root system is established. The snow is insulation." "I know." He looked at it. "I was just noting it." "The climb itself is dormant," she said. "The roots are what's working now. Underneath the snow." She paused. "It's still growing even when it doesn't look like it."

“The formula’s yours, so I need the extract standardized by spring. Sick kids don’t care about our timeline, so we’re moving fast. Can the new hybrid handle it?” I looked down the worktable at the row of grafted seedlings, six weeks of splicing and coaxing and starting over, bred to grow the delicate healing bloom on a root that could survive northern soil. Two of them had taken beautifully. The third was still looking up at me rather mockingly. “It’ll handle it,” I said, pointing a finger at the plant and then drawing it across my neck. A warning. The leaves almost seemed to shiver in response, or maybe that was just the wind.

As if hearing her words, Lyra broke from the dance and came to them, her face glowing with joy and something else—something solemn and understanding. "The Bond-Trees are blooming," she said. "The first time since they were born." A hush fell over the hall as the news spread. The Bond-Trees had grown tall and strong over the years, their silver and gold leaves shimmering in the sunlight, their roots going deep into the heart of the Nexus. But they had never bloomed.

In the way of something that has been asked and has decided to respond, which is a completely different quality of movement, carrying none of the reluctant, dragged quality of forced motion and all of the immediate, willing quality of something moving because it has chosen to move. Roots came up from the broken earth and they did not tear through the surface in the violent way of things emerging from underground but wove through it, finding the channels between the cracked soil and threading themselves through those channels with the patient, organic intelligence of living things that have been doing this for much longer than any of us have been alive. They reached the fissure in the ground

Instead, a lotus flower had blossomed on top of the cracked Nascent Soul. ‘Oh my god!’ ‘Have my three thousand Nascent Souls become a garden for lotus flowers?’ ‘Don’t tell me… That there’s going to be three thousand lotus flowers inside me?!’ Soon, Alex’s worries turned into reality. As every Nascent Soul cracked open, a beautiful lotus flower would come sprouting out of its cracks. Oddly enough, Alex wasn’t able to find the roots, despite the flowers growing right before his eyes. ‘Where is it?’

Mushrooms sprouted all around the gravesite and then something Cory did not anticipate happened. There must have been an acorn somewhere among the soil because an oak tree, watered by her tears, grew. It burst into life. She had to rush backwards away from the grave. Her back touched the bark of the tree closer to the creek. The oak grew taller than the one where Venom had been strung up. Flowers sprang up at the roots along with the treasured mushrooms all still sprouting around the base and spreading out much further than intended.

He didn't even understand the basic technical jargon. It seemed like the shop owner truly wasn't responsible for the fake herbs, but someone else instead. Frederick explained, "Forest-grown roots don't mean the Dragon's Tear roots are grown in the forest. It's just as shoddy, that's all. Forest-grown roots mean that the Dragon's Tear roots were placed in a faux-wilderness plot of soil and tended to by people. It's then stimulated to accelerate growth by technological means.