The Rootless Tree

Overview

The Rootless Tree is what the Unformed becomes against origin: growth from before anything was anchored to a source. It is the absence of grounding.

It reaches back before the first seed found soil, when growth was possible but had nowhere to happen. It is not barrenness; it is life with no foundation, the state in which origin, home and belonging still blur into growing, branching and becoming. Where it spreads, the "where I come from" that makes "who I am" possible comes loose.

It is "Rootless" because it has no earth, and a "Tree" because it branches without end in every direction while holding on to nothing.

Appearance and Manifestation

With no trunk to branch from it takes no form, and shows as a dissolution of the ground.

The Visual

• Visuals: Growth with no centre.
• Scale: Flowers blooming from a crack in bare stone, or a whole landscape turned floating garden.

The Sound

• Sound: Creak of wood, rustle of leaves, the pop of opening buds, all run into one ceaseless rustle.
• The Echo: A low wooden groan, the sound of a trunk that does not exist bearing a weight that cannot be measured.

The Feeling

• Touch: Nothing to hold on to. Your feet lose the ground and your memories lose their hold on you.
• Thought: Home feels like a story you were told. Your family's faces look like strangers'. Heritage and belonging thin into a floating "Growth."

Nature and Motivation

The Nature of the Unformed

Being anchored is no insult to it; as with all the Unformed, the hold simply loosens where it grows.

The Motivation: The Great Uprooting

Its one compulsion is to loose the root: to make a family just people, children of no one; a tradition just motion, no longer handed down; a clan just a crowd, no longer one blood. Exiles have called this freedom from origin; the Tree has no word for freedom, and roots let go where it grows.

Abilities and Powers

The Severing of Roots

It cuts a being off from where they come from.

• Effect: Skills and memories remain but mean nothing. A childhood memory plays like a stranger's life; a beloved song becomes a run of notes.
• Cost: The victim stays displaced wherever they stand, a branch with no trunk, unable to feel at home.

The Untethered Field

In its field things forget their origins. A person forgets where they were born; a building forgets its foundation; a river forgets its spring.

• Transmission: The Untethering takes hold through memory, in the usual Unformed way.

The Garden of Nowhere

It can graft a being into its own growth, making it one of the Grafted.

• Effect: The body branches and reaches with no trunk behind it; the Tree grows for them.
• Effect: The grafted one feels themselves branching and cannot find the root.

The Uprooting Tide

At full strength it would pull up every root at once, the foundations of the Primes and the ground of the Material Plane included.

The Threat to the Cosmos

It ends belonging.

• To Terra Prime: It lifts the Iron Backbone's mountains off their footing.
• To Aqua Prime: It cuts the Surging Deep off from its springs, leaving rivers with no source.
• To the Material Plane: Villages forget their founders, guilds their masters' lines, and rulers can no longer call on any custom older than themselves.

The Cascade Failure

At the Boundary it pulls up the grounding that fixes "Inside" in place (see the cascade failure).

Relationships

With the Primes

The Rootless Tree grows out of the substrate that preceded the Primes. It is kin to them, and their shadow: growth that never settled into any ground.

• Terra Prime: The Tree is the soil before the seed, the clay before the sculptor, the earth before the mountain: ground that has never held anything.
• Aqua Prime: The Tree is the rain that never reaches the ground, the river that has no bed, the tide that has no moon.
• Ignis Prime: The Tree is the spark that has no fuel, the flame that has no wick, the heat that has no source.

With the Beyonders

The Beyonders are wary of it; they are already far from their own source, and the Tree would cut the last tie.

With the Cast-Outs

The Cast-Outs still trace themselves to the Primes they fell from, and the Tree would sever even that memory (see the overview).

With Other Unformed

The Tree shares the Echoing Dark's work of undoing: the Dark takes a thing's name, the Tree its origin. It lies closest to the Nameless Current; the Current asks "Where are you going?", the Tree "Where do you come from?", and both questions go unanswered. The Shifting Sand lies close as well; see its page. Against the Great Slumber it pulls the other way: the Slumber would stop growth outright, the Tree lets it run wild, and neither leaves a self anchored anywhere.

Encounters and Legends

The City of Floating Gardens

A city weary of tradition felt its ground loosen under the Tree and did not resist. Buildings floated off their foundations; people forgot their ancestors; kin passed one another as strangers. When the Tree moved on, the city hung where it had drifted, a garden in mid-air, its people unable to say where they came from.

The Ancestor's Cut

A woman weighed down by her lineage felt her ties grow light as the Tree passed through her valley, and let them slip. She forgot her family, her homeland and her language. She lived on, and could never again be anyone's daughter, sister or mother.

The Pale Timber

Wood cut from the Grafted is light, pale, and sweet-smelling, and a band of wood-thieves once lopped a whole grove of them and sold the timber to a lord for his new hall. Within a year the hall had loosened from its footings and his household could not say whose roof they lived under. A rival house walked in and took it without a blow, and was gone itself by the next winter. The hall still stands empty, and shoots grow from its beams.

The Last Root

Those led home from the Untethering tell of one deep root still holding at its core, and guess it to be the first grounding ever made.

Weaknesses and Countermeasures

The Power of Belonging

It cannot uproot someone who claims their origin and their people.

• Strategy: Accept the weight of being tied to a place and a family, and say whose you are.

The Power of Foundation

A stone laid on purpose, a seed planted, a hearth built and kept: each new root holds the ground against it.

• Strategy: Plant. Build something that has to stay where it is.

The Power of the Primes

Through the Resonance of Foundation the Primes hold the ground: Terra Prime in earth and grounding, Aqua Prime in the source and the spring, Ignis Prime in the hearth and the home.

Role in the Cosmology

The Rootless Tree is the ghost of the ungrounded: the reminder that growth needs somewhere to grow from.