IV. The Dreaming Root
Beneath the ruin, the root still dreams.
It keeps no map.
It does not ask permission.
It threads through concrete and bone alike,
soft as rot, strong as hunger.
It remembers the forest,
the weight of footsteps and rain,
the pulse of worm and ember.
It sings the names we forgot.
The field was never silent.
Under asphalt, mycelia expands,
trading news of rain,
of beetle, of rust.
No idol reaches this deep.
No wire moans here.
No line can split it.
Even silence decays to soil.
Here the world rehearses itself again,
cell by cell,
tangle by tangle.
None were ever its masters.
Only the noise above its domain.
When the air breaks open,
the scent of loam is revelation.
The root speaks through the cracks.
The memory is not a ghost.
It is wet and breathing.
It stains the hands of anyone who digs.
It reverberates through the bones of the child who walks on bare soil
the taste of rain,
the scent of green moss breaking stone.
Each step wakes something older than footsteps.
The root remembers,
and the body remembers with it.
The stars remember before the sun learned its name.
The root whispered upward,
and the light answered,
as kin.
Above, the stars whisper their own remembering,
in ecstatic languages of fire and drift.
Nothing that touches the root is ever gone.
It folds itself deeper.
Waiting for the frost to ease.
Remember.