Chương 148: Judah, Part 2

The voice forced my eyes open and my body to scramble to my feet, ready to tear apart whatever was in front of me. As it so turned out, what was in front of me wasn't really something to tear apart. It was that old man, the one who was carrying those Wyrdwood hearts everywhere. Father Viscum. Though he seemed to be not a person, but instead a growth jutting out of the bark.

"So, have you been enjoying the Platanos' hospitality?" He repeated, wooden arms crossed behind his back. Seeing his mouth and limbs shift while still being made of that material sent my skin crawling.

"What the Hell are you?" I asked.

"A man humble before his god, like any other," he answered, calmly observing me. Observing my face. My mask- I scrambled for it, lifting it from my neck to pull it back over my face and hide my identit-"Leo Holt, we already know your name, your face naturally comes with that. There's no other life you live to target," Viscum added on, stopping me in my place with his words. Lowering my mask, my brow furrowed.

"Why are you acting so placid?"

"You're in my home. I need to show cordiality to my guests," he answered. He then gestured off to the side, as the walls of the Platanos shifted and contorted. Branches and knots piled together and formed their best approximation of a staircase that spiraled up and out of sight.

"Shall we take a walk and talk? I know you have places to be." I stared at him. He just completely contorted the Wyrdwood here. He could easily have turned those steps into traps of some kind, stab me through my feet, tear my legs apart, tie me against the wall and let me get torn apart by ADU troopers up above waiting for a chance to get their payback on me. After about ten seconds of unflinching silence, he spoke.

"I can't hurt you, Leo. My affinity for Wyrdwood is simply to harmlessly speak to and fertilize it. It doesn't directly obey me."

"How am I supposed to believe that?"

"I would have simply killed you in your sleep if I were capable of directly harming you." With that, he simply began… sliding up the steps, for lack of better words.

"Come. It will be faster than climbing. Slightly. You're only one eighth of the way up." I retrieved my phone, checking the time. 9: 32 AM. Like fifteen minutes before my alarm would've set off. Battery was sitting at about 62%. Couldn't afford to keep picking at it. Only check when I needed to. I turned the alarm up and began following Father Viscum up. That was fifteen hours of climbing earlier. If I was only an eighth of the way, that actually did add up to about five days total. Tancred was sharp on the timing.

"You are likely aware that there's no killing you early, or the Platanos not being climbed. Maybe not inherently," Viscum mused as he moved ahead of me, always just a couple feet past me.

"Otherwise, with your strength, why not simply topple the tree?" No, wait. He was right. Why didn't I just knock the tree over? That would've likely killed everyone in it. Stopped this problem entirely.

"I-" I started, my voice hitching and letting the silence ring out.

"The answer, I'm unsure of," Viscum added.

"My theory is more of a crude grope in the dark, but I think within you truly is a similar fire as Brother Gleditsia. I think you both see a necessary finality in a battle man-to-man."

"I'm nothing like him," I almost spat out. He shook his head.

"It's easy to tell yourself that. But the truth is you two do share more traits than you understand. For starters, your upbringings were cruel and unusual. You grew up alone in an orphanage. Gleditsia was seen as a failed experiment, at first."

"Experiment?" I asked.

"Is Gleditsia not a human?" It would explain a lot about him, but then why would he have a human face?

"Hm," he mused, phasing through a stray leaf as he kept sliding up the steps.

"I suppose I should start from the very beginning of the Anti-Deforestation Union's history. It is not too long, I promise," he stated, raising a hand as if to deter me from punching him out of the wall. Admittedly I considered it.

"Master Sequoia and I were originally part of a militant group known as the Weather Underground Organization. Are you familiar?" I shook my head.

"No." Focusing so much on fighting the ADU left me completely flunking the politics course at UVA. I wasn't able to focus on any of it, let alone remember details like militant groups in history. Viscum nodded.

"For the best. Just know it was not a peaceable organization. Master Sequoia always believed in the notion a world order dominated by mankind was an immoral one, a cancer that produced tumors like industry and exploitation. If he were not part of that group, he would have been part of another. He was also intimately interested in esoteric means of verifying his beliefs, that man laid no claim to Earth."

"But he's human. Why would he hate his own kind so much?"

"There is no good, or reasonable, answer to that," the Father elaborated.

"Some men simply are born with a hate for their own. They recognize a darkness within their own species that the rest cannot recognize. Like a fish discovering the existence of water." I hurried to match my pace with him so that I could look him in the face for my question.

"What about you? You're talking about him like you don't agree with him." Viscum laughed.

"What about me? I'm an ex-terrorist who wanted to overthrow the government. I still do. I too find mankind repulsive for its blights on the world. I see how we pollute the Ganga, how there are mountain ranges of plastic trash, how entire ecosystems in South America and Africa are being destroyed by slash-and-burn farming." He waved it off dismissively.

"Humanity repulses me for how we've abused our world and I would appreciate more appropriate caretakers. Whether Master Sequoia saw it similarly or simply spoke of it as such, I do not know, and thus I do not make that answer for him." My gaze focused on him, before looking out along the stairway. Massive groves and gardens, but still no signs of other human beings. Even he wasn't actually here, unless he fully fused with the Wyrdwood.

"Right," Viscum resumed.

"As I was saying. Master Sequoia sought esoteric means to verify his biases. He took to magic. And with the magic he used, specifically, granted him a means of communicating with wood. Though at times, he claims he's always had some inclination of its 'voice' prior. In his communications with wood, he ended up in contact with somewhere else entirely." As we moved further up, he stopped and gestured off towards an area that shifted before my eyes.

What was initially just a grove-esque area had rapidly shifted into an endless networks of roots and branches. Immediately, I was reminded of the vision Gleditsia inflicted upon me, and my body tensed up with an immediate desire to destroy it. Some sort of primordial hatred within me. Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

"The Arboreal Senate.

'Senate' comes from the Latin word 'Senatus,' which refers to a collective of the old. It is how their name translates into English. They are from their own world. Or, more aptly, they are their own world. An infinite network of trees communicating with each other, processing thoughts to achieve what they describe as enlightenment: Totality of all thought." That's not what it felt like when I was being shown it. It felt like infestation. But I knew he was too far gone to understand that.

Or maybe he did, and just saw it as a good thing. I could only listen to find out.

"When we were informed of this by one of their representatives, Nemea, Master Sequoia and I made an offer. If they steward humanity, we would help bring the Arboreal Senate into our world to cure it of the pox we've plagued upon the natural world and overtake ours. They were enticed, as one of the key means of achieving that processing requires further thought. Their world had lost all other thinking things quite some time ago, so their progress had slowed."

I could only imagine what they did to whoever lived with them before.

"And so, we spent the past thirty years working against deforestation and slowly preparing for this day. Early on we were introduced to a material known as Wyrdwood. A unique, magical wood powered by thought and emotion. If you feed it your thoughts, it acts in return. Some are more compatible, can cede more of their thoughts. Father Quercus was the first to have such mastery over it." That explained why he was so effective in combat.

"What about you? Did yours come after?" If I could maybe figure out the full extent of his abilities, I could probably safely counter him. Asking questions could lead to the right answers. Viscum resumed moving as he answered, and I followed along.

"I was the first Father, due to my ability to naturally fertilize Wyrdwood and augment it. Father Quercus, initially, was Brother Quercus, due to his unique bond with it. A greater one than mine ever could be. I can communicate with Wyrdwood, but Father Quercus could control it wholesale."

"Wait, why did he become Father Quercus, then?" A smile cracked across the bark on his face.

"That would be the experiment, as I told you. Brother Quercus believed that humans naturally could not fully bond with Wyrdwood. He had ample evidence, with how we have to physically remove our hearts to accept Wyrdwood in its place, and it grants only limited interactions." That's when it struck me. Those Wyrdwood hearts hanging around Viscum all the other times I saw him. The one Quercus had hanging from his necklace. That he and Assacu and Mangal ate. They weren't Wyrdwood constructs.

Those were their actual hearts. Converted and corrupted. They were removed so the Wyrdwood could modify them.

"And that's when he chose to have a son."

"Right you are. He imbued Wyrdwood from his own body into the womb of a woman in our ranks, who died in the birth that ensued. The child born was named David, a feasibly mundane name so he could disguise himself in human society while we researched his development." David. Gleditsia. And wait, if it was imbued Wyrdwood… Quercus first mentioned three of those Sperma tes Parthenou. But when he took the kids, he mentioned two.

Was Gleditsia the-"Initially, he was a disappointment," Viscum stated as though to intentionally interrupt my thoughts.

"Totally mundane, though Brother Quercus still trained him and educated him on various martial cultures and ideals and how they tied into championing for the trees that mankind has so thoroughly ruined. Once he came of age, we still attempted the process of connecting him with Wyrdwood. And the results…" he trailed off, as the shifting tree interior around us began to form flickering shapes of a human form. Then, it showed a branch pushing into the human's chest, followed by something being removed.

The human's body began to bulge and distort, before taking on a very familiar silhouette. Gleditsia's armor.

"The connection was beyond perfect. He didn't simply talk to it like I or Master Sequoia could. It came to him as naturally as a part of his body. He could forcibly grow entire trees of Wyrdwood on a touch. And his body proved inhumanly strong and capable. He was everything Brother Quercus wanted in his experiment, and so he gave up the title of Brother to David. He took the title of Gleditsia, due to his affinity with thorned growths in the form of swords."

"That explains why so much of his body is just Wyrdwood, when I punched out and tore off bits of it," I muttered. In my periphery, I could observe as the Wyrdwood sculpture stopped following us and stayed fixed on this sculpture of Gleditsia, sword raised.

"Correct. Gleditsia's natural connection to Wyrdwood meant his body fully merged with it as soon as his heart was replaced. It was at that point Nemea explained we could finally start working towards the ceremonial device to allow the Arboreal Senate to fully connect with our world: The Nemean Throne." That name, it'd been mentioned so many times and yet I still wasn't sure what it meant.

"What even is that?" I asked.

"An altar, of sorts, that Master Sequoia will use to connect the two worlds. The three Sperma tes Parthenou will serve as mental and emotional canvases for Nemea to initially occupy before immediately using the Platanos to expand, overtake the world once Agent Richmond's disconnection ends." Agent Richmond. Her and Hidalgo.

"Why is she helping you? And Hidalgo from the HenchNet? How do they benefit from having their worlds taken from them for this?" He waved it off dismissively as we continued moving. I lost track of how far up we had spiraled up and around the interior of the tree, and despite the brevity of the conversation it didn't feel like this was all happening in a short moment. It just seemed to stretch on and on.

"Agent Richmond received the vision of Nemea's blessing from one of our clandestine agents, and was convinced of its value. Normally she wouldn't have much direct power, but after consuming Father Pine's heart, she found the strength to separate the entire region from anywhere else, giving us a space to resume the ritual." Wyrdwood folded and rolled around us to make a bust of Richmond's face, before shifting to Hidalgo's.

"As for Hidalgo, he benefits greatly. As a vampire, he cannot be out during the day. The endless canopy of the Arboreal Senate will allow him to walk without the sun killing him. In addition, his wife will no longer have to hide." His wife… Hidalga. I recalled her appearance again. Horrifying and monstrous. But Hidalgo seemed quite defensive of her.

"How does she benefit? What even is she?"

"She was human, until experimentation turned her into what she is now. A poor creature so deformed that she learned to lean out of perception entirely for anyone except her husband, who loves her dearly. Hidalgo took to vampirism to avenge her. Though now they both dwell in darkness and shadow, hidden from the world that they wanted to express their love in. The Arboreal Senate can provide that, and so he was convinced." I clicked my teeth.

"The only emotion Hidalgo feels is disgust. He told me that himself."

"Love isn't an emotion. It's an ideal, a conviction and methodology woven together. Emotions are nouns and love is a verb. His disgust does not exist around her because of his promise and dedication to loving her no matter what. And a love that powerful is greatly valuable to the Wyrdwood. It feeds well off of it, so it is more than happy to give Hidalgo and Hidalga as much opportunity for love as possible."

"So even your own allies are food to it."

"No one is food to the Wyrdwood. Our thoughts are merely fertilizer to them, to lead them further to their goal. You could live in similar luxury, Leo." He glanced to me.

"Don't you wish to experience being loved? By family, friends, paramours?" There was no need for me to dwell on it.

"Nothing about any of this is love. I'm not joining you people." Viscum observed me for a few more moments, before nodding and continuing his ascent.

"Right. I suppose I shall tell you one last detail, then. The Platanos is not a tree in the traditional sense. We used to have another Father, Father Populus. His use of Wyrdwood emulated the quaking aspen tree, where he expands as an organism that produces numerous nodes, a living grove of sorts. He and I have made a direct bond so that I can enable his grove to expand and form a great Wyrdwood tree: The Platanos. That is, of course, only one function of his abilities." The ramp stopped, as we ended up in a…

strangely empty chamber in the Platanos. Still the size of a neighborhood. A sparse number of growths around. Climbing wouldn't be impossible, but I could tell this was meant to lock me in.

"He is also the one responsible for the Wyrdwood warriors you have faced." They grew out of the walls. Knights looming over me, Hussars with their blades ready. More crude and humanoid ones taking predatory stances. None of those tailed ones, but with the small platoon here, they didn't need one.

"You will not stop the formation of the Nemean Throne, Leo Holt. The Platanos will be your grave. We will not cease in trying to kill you until you cede your body and mind to us." With that, he began to sink into the wall, and the ramp below me fused shut into just a floor. The Knights, Hussars, and unknown Wyrdwood men all poised for attack. I wasn't going to let them lead an assault on me. I just had to tune in as much as I could before any headaches would start, before the soreness in my body would fight back.

Something like eighty percent. With one throw of a punch, all the strength or gravity or whatever the Hell it was focused entirely on my arm, the wind cracked. The wall at the other end exploded from the sheer force of air pressure, and in front of me they all shattered like glass from the inertia, not even able to bend or snap in time. I took a deep breath, hoping to God that'd be hint enough, but as more crawled out of the walls, I realized it: This was going to be a long climb.