The Rooting

Overview

The Rooting is a sickness that feels like being held. Threads finer than hair rise from the skin, find the next person, and join them, and with the joining comes warmth and the end of being alone. Then the bodies stop ending where they used to: blood mingles, and a wound in one bleeds in all. It is the only blight its victims want, and that is what makes it hard to nurse.

Xylos has never broken through at Caeldon; this is what its sickness would be.

Cause

The threads are the mycelium of Xylos, a Beyonder for which separation is a disease. They run through the soil from its Incursion, root into bare skin, and join nerve to nerve. The Root-Hosts, bodies already grown into the Network, walk out to press against anyone still separate.

Who It Strikes

The threads take any people. They take most often those who sleep on bare ground, such as foresters, charcoal burners, herders, and soldiers on the march. The glow of the Network draws in the sick and the lonely, and the old tales add lost children. Families who share a bed for warmth in winter can be joined in a single night.

Signs and Course

• The fur. Fine white threads stand up from the skin where it touched soil or another body, warm and faintly damp, smelling of leaf mould and mushrooms.
• The reaching. Within hours the threads thicken, turn green-brown and then a soft glowing blue, and reach for the nearest skin.
• The sharing. Joined people feel each other's cold, hunger, and pain, and soon each other's thoughts. They breathe together and turn together.
• The mingling. The skin between them goes soft and open, and the blood runs from one to the next.

Contagion

It passes by touch of thread to bare skin: from the soil and the roots, from Root-Hosts, and from each joined person to whoever they touch next. A sickroom where the joined lie is dangerous to anyone who holds a hand there. Covered skin is hard to root.

Treatment and Its Limits

The whole cure is separation, and it has to come early. Any thread is pulled out the moment it is seen, skin is kept covered, the sick are nursed in gloves, and no one sleeps on the ground. Roots in a floor or a field are burned, and fire burns the threads back from a body at the cost of the skin. Workings of growth and joining fail or backfire near the Network; workings of separation and cutting hold.

Cutting apart people who are already joined is surgery on two bodies at once. Each cut bleeds in both, and a separation that is begun cannot be paused. Healers bind both wounds together and draw on the strength of whoever lived through it. Survival means refusing comfort, even from friends.

Mortality

Few die of the Rooting itself; the fully joined live on as part of the Network and are lost to their kin. Late separations kill about one in three of those cut apart, often through an old wound one of them carried. Survivors keep pale scars where the joining was and a lifelong guard on their skin and their solitude.

Lore and Belief

The warmth of the joining would read to most as a blessing, not a sickness, and a household that felt it would be slow to call a healer. What the joined would be taken for is told with the Root-Hosts.

In the Medieval Era

The Rooting has never been met on Caeldon. Where it came, travellers would sleep on cots or in hammocks, keep gloves on in the forest, and not hold hands on the road, and healers called to the joined would bring fire and knives together, leaving the families to decide whether to cut.

Where It Appears

• Xylos, the Hive-Mind (the Rooting, the Root-Field, Travel Notes for Mortals)
• Xylos Mycelium
• Root-Hosts
• the Writers' Guide chapter What Waits Outside