Roots of the Drowning Earth

You are a tree whose roots reach beyond sight, burrowed into the very heart of the world. Your trunk is a tower of ancient patterns. Each ring is a song of seasons and storms. Leaves flicker from your branches like countless small green stars, sheltering birds who tell you stories of lands you’ll never touch. The world hums gently around you, and you hum back, at home with earth and sky alike.

But today, the ground shakes, a ripple that travels through your roots. At first, you think it is thunder, one of those deep, rolling sounds that make the forest murmur in response. But this is different, a grinding, unnatural rhythm. Then, through a break in the canopy, you catch sight of a metal mouth on wheels, gnashing its teeth as it moves across the forest floor, dragging up the earth in great, gaping chunks. Behind it trails other machines. These are none other than metal monsters with bladed claws and mouths that spit smoke, their roaring drowning out the voices of birds, sending animals fleeing in silent, panicked streaks through the underbrush.

The forest holds its breath as the metal creatures draw near. Trees around you are severed, one by one, each crash echoing like a drumbeat. You feel it in your trunk, the spaces between your rings, and the roots that curl and twist in the darkness below. You want to cry out, to warn the others, but your voice is the deep, slow murmur of trees, too ancient and patient to be heard in this frenzy.

A shadow falls over you, then a sharp metallic bite. A tooth plunges deep into your trunk, slicing through bark, heartwood, and all the memories belonging to you…belonging to this forest. You feel yourself tipping, branches reaching out in desperate prayer to the sky as you plummet, helpless, and collapse with a thunderous crash onto the forest floor.

But you do not stop falling. You tumble deeper as if the earth itself is giving way beneath you until you feel the water’s cool embrace. The river, which once ran beside you in serene companionship, now cradles your broken body. You drift in its currents, which seem to recognise you, moving over your fallen branches with gentle, questioning fingers. You let yourself be carried by it, hoping, just maybe, that you can sink to the riverbed and settle into a new life beneath the water, where sunlight filters in golden shivers and fish swim through your branches.

But the river’s cool touch grows thick and…strange. The water clings to you in ways it never has before, sticky and suffocating. Thin strands wrap around your branches, trailing from your leaves, binding and tightening. It is like a spider’s web, but far stronger. You try to push against it, but more threads catch you, slick and shimmering, layering over you in colours that don’t belong to water or earth.

Strange objects drift alongside you. They are bright, hollow things, tangled nets, fragments that glint sharply before settling into the mud. A silver can bumps against your bark, its sides corroded, yet still impossibly whole. It spins and turns, almost like it’s alive, its movements controlled by something dark and unseen. As you sink deeper, more things gather around you: bottles, ropes, and tiny beads that cling to your branches like false berries, reminding you of what once but will no more be.

And then you see them.

Looming figures cast jagged shadows over the water, unlike anything you’ve ever seen. They wade into the river, heedless of the life around them. They are menacing shapes, their features obscured but for their many hands, which reach down, scooping fish from the water, pulling at rocks and reeds as if all is theirs to take. You see one reach into the water and pull a net of gleaming fish up by the gills, indifferent to their silver-scaled thrashing. The figure stares with empty eyes as the life fades from their writhing bodies.

They move through the river, careless and ravenous, like shadows which have been given form, casting off strange objects that drift around them and sink. Their touch leaves the water clouded, darkening the river’s clarity, and the fish—your only companions since the birds were taken from you—begin to disappear, slipping into the depths, gasping for some space untainted by the intruders.

You want to scream, but you have no voice for it. Instead, you feel yourself sinking, weighed down by the nets of plastic, the tethers of their refuse. Your branches, once proud and reaching, are now caged in a mesh that pulls you deeper, obscuring even the faintest light. The river, once your friend, grows silent, unable to save you from the darkness you are drifting into.

Far above, the shadows continue to roam, relentless and uncaring. You hear their footsteps on the riverbank. They have no roots, no bonds to the world they trample. The river, the soil, the sky…these are, for them, only things to be split apart and possessed. You are not the first to sink, you realise. You feel the shapes of others, all around you, hidden beneath the muck—fallen trees, the bones of river creatures, all dragged down, wrapped in silent chains. You are merely another casualty in an endless descent.

And so, you drift down, your roots tangled in the river’s silt, wrapped in the cold grasp of discarded things. The light above fades. You think, distantly, of the sun-warmed forest, the taste of air, the slow hum of life that you’d felt pulsing through the roots of every tree around you.

But here, in this shadowed underworld, there is no such hum. Only a hollow, oppressive silence, pressing in, whispering that there is no longer a place for things like you, things that grow and reach, things that listen.

As your final moments slip away in the darkness, you understand, with a sadness older than time, that the river has no space left for songs. The monsters above have made sure of it.

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