Unsleeping Patron - Roots in the Skull

Condensation ran thick across the glass panes of Greenhouse 14, trickling in steady, grey rivulets that smelled of wet manure and sour compost. Hester pulled her linen wool scarf up over her nose, her copper-framed spectacles fogging instantly as she stepped through the sliding oak door.Behind her, the young farmhand, Miller, wouldn’t cross the threshold. He stood out in the gravel alley of Agricultural District 39, his hands tucked tight into his armpits, his teeth clicking together in a fast, rhythmic chatter that had nothing to do with the morning air.”In the back,” Miller rasped, his eyes darting toward the timber rafters above. “By the tomato troughs. He’s been sitting there since two hours before dawn.”Hester adjusted her spectacles, her thumb leaving a smudge of dark loam on the wire rim. She picked her way down the narrow brick aisle, stepping over clay pots, coils of hemp hose, and wooden flats of sprouted wheat.In the third bay, where the sun-lamps hung from iron chains, sat Old Lin.He was thirty-five, a former transmigrator who had survived the trek from Brierhold six years ago. He sat in a two-foot-deep wooden potting trough filled with dark, damp river silt. He wore no boots. His trousers were shredded at the shins, the blue denim torn apart from the inside out by thick, pale taproots that had driven through his ankles, branching into hundreds of fibrous hair-roots that anchored his legs six inches deep into the soil.Lin didn’t move. He didn’t blink.His skin had lost its weather-beaten tan, fading to the smooth, opaque white of a peeled turnip. Out of the crown of his skull, bursting directly through the sagittal suture of his bone, sprouted three thick, fleshy pink petals. They unfolded in the warm, damp air, dripping a slow, clear nectar that smelled faintly of boiled sugar and crushed rose hips onto his collarbones.Hester stopped three paces back. Her heart knocked against her ribs with a sudden, sharp panic that made her throat go bone-dry.”Lin?” she called softly.The man didn’t turn his head. His mouth was slightly open, his tongue pink and motionless, but his chest didn’t rise or fall. When Hester stepped closer, her boots crunching on dropped terra-cotta shards, she heard it a faint, dry rustle coming from inside his chest, like dead leaves brushing against paper in a light draft.She unbuckled her canvas medical kit, pulling out a six-inch iron scalpel and a pair of brass forceps. Her fingers were cold, trembling slightly as she reached out, touching the side of Lin’s neck.There was no carotid pulse. The skin felt smooth, rubbery, and cold as a turnip skin pulled fresh from a root cellar.Hester pressed the scalpel’s edge against his left forearm, making a shallow two-inch incision through the white skin.No red blood welled from the cut.Out of the open flesh oozed a thick, pale green gel, followed immediately by dozens of thin, writhing thread-like fibers. They weren’t blood vessels. They were green, silk-like plant fibers that reached out into the humid air, twisting like tiny earthworms toward the overhead sun-lamp before curling back down to seal the wound with a weave of dark sap.”It’s not a Miasma rot,” Hester whispered, her voice dropping into the quiet greenhouse.”It’s an anchor,” a voice said from the doorway.Hester jumped, her hand twitching so violently the scalpel scraped against Lin’s arm. She turned her head, her heart slamming against her sternum.Silas stood in the narrow brick aisle.He had been gone three years. He carried no canvas pack, no willow rope, but his presence filled the moist greenhouse like a sheet of cold lead. He wore a simple tunic of unbleached linen, tied with a leather cord. His bald head held no hair, but his skin no longer radiated the raw, brassy light of his early ascension. The amber of his Mind-Light sat deep inside his frame, dark, heavy, and motionless as forged iron, while his eyes pupils ringed with liquid crimson stared flatly at the pink petals sprouting from Lin’s skull.He looked broader across the chest, his posture unyielding, like a stone pillar planted in the mud.”Silas,” Hester breathed, her scalpel lowering an inch. “You… you’re back.”Silas walked down the aisle, his bare soles making no sound against the damp brick floor. He stopped beside the wooden trough, reached down, and placed his palm flat against Lin’s bare, turnip-white shoulder.He closed his eyes for two seconds.The amber light beneath Silas’s skin didn’t flare, but a low, metallic hum vibrated through the greenhouse, making the glass panes in the roof rattle in their iron frames.”His heart is wood,” Silas said, opening his eyes. His voice carried that strange, double-layered resonance that made the hairs on Hester’s neck stand straight up. “The central artery has been replaced with a three-inch taproot that runs straight down his spine into the soil. Every blood vessel in his liver, his brain, and his lungs has been devoured by plant fibers.”Hester swallowed hard, looking at the clear, sweet-smelling nectar dripping from the pink petals onto Lin’s ear. “Is it contagious? Did Miller touch him?””It’s not a spore,” Silas said. He reached out with two fingers, touching one of the pink petals on Lin’s head. The petal shivered, its fleshy edge curling away from his skin as if repelled by the crimson ring in his eyes. “The fibers aren’t feeding on his meat. They’re feeding on his soul. Someone is planting seeds in their minds, Hester, and the roots are growing out through their skulls.”