Uprooted Novels & Stories

Roar! With a thunderous roar, Dalton suddenly hugged the roots of the banyan tree and uprooted the whole thing by himself. Mad King was a man of his word, always fulfilling what he said he would do. Having declared that he would uproot the whole tree, he indeed did just that. That was the extent of Mad King’s insanity! Looking at the current state of the tree he had personally planted decades ago, Silas could not accept it. Not only had it been slashed in half, it had even been cut off from vitality, as Mad King had uprooted the whole tree.

Beside him was an old woman whose eyes had been polished down to two featureless spheres of violet glass by an auditor’s lens. "They aren't stable," the Assistant said, her bare feet sinking into the wet gravel as she helped a young woman whose fingers were still fused into the shape of a typewriter key. "The system didn't delete them; it just stopped validating their code. If we don't ground their variables into this earth before the winter wind hits, they’ll turn back into loose paragraphs and blow away." "We have the soil," Julian said, running down from the schoolhouse wall with a shallow basket filled with the copper-green seeds that had fallen from our tree. "We ground the old ledgers

Ursa’s once clean skin was again covered in dirt, her scars from her time in the forest reopening on her arms and legs as the harsh thorns of the wall grazed her limbs. She rounded another corner, but her face fell as she saw one of the marks that she had previously left. She quickly turned around, running in another direction. Her legs moved on their own; she could hardly feel them until her foot got caught on a branch that appeared out of nowhere. With a yelp, she fell to the ground face forward. Tears threatened to fall, but she was distracted when she felt something move under the ground right under her. It twisted and turned, shooting out of the soil. It was a tree root. It kept growing

"We're Unplugging it." The white sphere exploded. The Root Directory has been corrupted by the Glitch. The Architect Overmind is experiencing a system-wide crash. But as the simulation collapses, the Feral Six realize that "Unplugging" the machine means there is no longer a "Source Code" to hold their physical bodies together. They are falling into the "True Void" between dimensions.

He fell forward, coughing, as his shadow returned to its solid, jagged shape. "Kaima?" he wheezed. "I’m here, Rowan," I said, helping him up. "And we’re going to kill the Gardener." --- ### The Root of the Problem The Gardener screamed—a sound of high-pitched feedback that made the white marble tree groan. "You are a parasite! You are destroying the perfection! If you will not be pruned, you will be **Uprooted**!" The ground beneath us began to shake. The beautiful green valley began to tilt, the grass turning into sharp, silver needles. The white tree began to grow, its branches reaching out like giant hands to crush us.

’ I ordered and he immediately gave me back control. With desperate hands, I scraped the dirt away until I finally reached what felt like a hard surface. I dug and dug until I finally could see what it was. The tree’s roots were formed into some kind of egg. It appeared to be protecting whoever was inside. I used my strength to pry it apart and to my surprise, it was pretty easy.

“The bloom no longer seeks to unify. It seeks to remember together.” We began replanting the Foldroots—those core anchors of resonance once buried deep in the Accord’s construction. Not to stabilize the Spires. But to destabilize our assumptions. Each Foldroot, when awakened, whispered a different memory. Some were gentle: the scent of ancestral bloomfields, the feel of the first harmonizer stone in hand. Others were violent: the rupture of early bloom-harvests, the screams of lost harmony threads. We listened to all of them. That became the practice.

She wipes carefully around the engraved names. Adrian watches until she finishes. When his footsteps finally reach her, Rosalie turns. Surprise flashes across her face before she reminds herself that he has every reason to be here. The bottle beside his father’s grave is the same single malt Adrian brought. He opens both and pours a measure from each into the earth. “Two drinks this year, Dad. Try not to get drunk. Mom will never let you hear the end of it.” Rosalie’s eyes sting. She lays white roses at Helen Mercer’s grave. “My mother said these were your favorite.”

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.

It was warm, laced with a distinct Owerri accent, and entirely alive. "If you are listening to this, it means the network has failed you," my mother’s voice vibrated through the horn, making my chest tighten with a sudden, suffocating grief. "Chiamaka, my beautiful girl... if you are reading the sands, you must understand that the Third Root is not a weapon of defense like the Shield in Cross River. It is a long-range Broadcasting Hub. It was built to transmit the 'Sequence 0' across the atmosphere, to reset the human mind to its original, uncorrupted frequency before the Vanes began their biochemical coding." I leaned against the stone table, my tears cutting clean tracks through the red de