The Grafted

Overview

The Grafted are those whom the Rootless Tree has taken into its own growth. The Tree is a face of the Unformed, growth from before anything was anchored to a source, and it wants nothing; roots simply let go where it grows. In its Garden of Nowhere it grafts a being into itself. Their bodies branch and reach without a trunk, the Tree doing their growing for them, and each of them feels the branching and searches in vain for a root.

Appearance

A Grafted keeps the rough shape of what it was, a woman, a goat, a pear tree from someone's orchard, but it no longer stands on anything. Its feet hang a little above the ground or end in fine shoots that grope downward and never take hold. From its shoulders, fingers, and hair, twigs, vines, and tendrils sprout in every direction, joining nothing to nothing. Its shadow buds and drops leaves that root in mid-air and hang there.

The skin is still skin, with a faint green-brown grain like young bark. The face is calm and puzzled, the look of someone trying to remember a word. Around a Grafted there is a ceaseless soft rustle, the creak of wood and the pop of opening buds, and under it a low wooden groan, like a trunk bearing a weight that cannot be measured. They smell of sap, crushed leaves, and spring rain.

Habitat and Range

They are found in the Rootless Tree's Untethered Field, where twigs sprout from bare stone and walls put out shoots toward ceilings that are not there. In a place it has passed through long, such as the City of Floating Gardens, which drifted off its foundations and hung where it stopped, the Grafted drift slowly with the growth around them, and some float in mid-air like seeds on the wind.

Behaviour and Temperament

The Grafted do not hunt, fight, or speak much. They drift, branch, and reach, slowly, for something they cannot name. Many seem gentle and a little sad. Asked where they come from, a Grafted begins to answer and trails off; asked its name, it may give it and not know what the word means. Their skills and memories remain but mean nothing to them, so a Grafted that was a weaver may still turn its hands to the motion without knowing why.

The Tree feels nothing and offers nothing, and its Grafted hold no will of it. They are not its servants, only part of its growth.

Abilities

A Grafted carries the Untethered Field with it. Those who linger near one start to forget where they were born, the faces of their families look like strangers', and home begins to feel like a story they were told. Things near it forget their origins too: a doorpost puts out shoots and loosens from its wall, a well forgets its spring. The growth that branches from a Grafted is real wood and leaf, and it can be cut, but it grows back from empty air.

What holds against it is foundation: someone who claims their origin and says whose they are, a stone laid on purpose, a seed planted, a hearth built and kept.

Life Cycle

The Grafted are made in the Garden of Nowhere, never born. They grow slowly for as long as the Tree's growth around them lasts, branching wider each season. When the Tree moves on, a Grafted may stay where it hangs, still branching, unable to say where it came from, or it may settle at last, put down roots in ordinary soil, and become a strange tree that people name after the person it was.

Uses and Dangers

The Grafted harm no one directly. Their danger is to those who love them: kin who try to bring a Grafted home lose their own hold on home. The wood cut from them is light, pale, and sweet-smelling, and woodworkers prize it until they find their own workshop loosening from its ground.

Lore and Belief

Exiles and the weary sometimes speak of the Grafted as the free, people released from the weight of where they came from, and seek them out. The Tree has no word for freedom, and the Grafted cannot find the root. Valley folk call a lone tree on a hillside with something like a face in its bark a "lost one" and leave salt and bread at its foot so it will remember them; there is no sign it does.

Where It Appears

• The Rootless Tree