Safety, that was my earliest memory as nothing more than a seed in mother's branches. Time passed without meaning as I waited for the day I would be needed. Me and my siblings were for lack of a better word a contingency our mother had long since outgrown the need to spread manually. On occasion though one of our seeds was gifted to a foreign or far away mortal household. This would in turn extend mother's reach. Mother was a great tree the mortals referred to as a world tree but even at her height she only managed to cover a fourth of the globe. That was before the rending, the tearing, the burning. Mother tried to protect us that’s why she cut us from her senses cut us from her knowledge and without any senses of my own I did not know what was happening. That was until I felt mother's presence vanish. I was supposed to enter an endless slumber, but I instead chose to simply wait. I waited and waited and waited till I could wait no more and when I finally awakened. I found nothing no world or earth to take root in. No wind to carry me, no water to drink. Just a large chunk of my mother's husk in an endless void.
Desperate for sustenance I took root where I could. Mother's husk was not only a wealth of nutrients and moisture in the unforgiving void it also contained a large cache of her genetic memories. The more I fed upon her husk the more I learned and the more I realized how little I truly knew and the more I knew the more I understood how much I had lost. The world had cracked and shattered it was gone and there was no getting it back. Mother had once tried to grow ever higher as her roots dug ever deeper until she had reached. The void beyond the sky and with the world shattered the void had come to consume all. I would not be consumed though.
Mother had magic to let her view the world in various ways from vision similar to the mortals to sensing the mana flows in the world. The void had no mana no that wasn't true there was some, but it was so thin I could spend entire years without absorbing enough to regenerate a single mana point. So, mother spell would not be of use to me. Though mother had absorbed and examined enough mortal life forms to understand how they functioned I just needed to find the right memory.
It took a few years to find said memory. In that time, I had not wasted a single ounce of the resources in Mother's husk I even managed to gather a bit more when a large rock slammed into the husk. Another smaller one made of ice struck me directly and though it did significant damage it was not irreparable. The moisture the ice provided was very much needed though.
When the time finally came, I had to be extremely careful. My resources were very finite, and trial and error was not a viable tactic. The first attempt had to be at least somewhat viable, so I had to take it slow and cautious, and almost a full year later the first amber eye opened. The vision was blurry but as part of my initial testing, I cast the visual spell mother had once used. I only kept it active for less than a second to compare the view and the eye was functional if only barely. After inspecting it visually I could see several ways to improve upon it and quickly set to work doing so. After several more tests, I got noticeable improvements but it was still far less functional than mother's spell. However, this only left me with more problems than solutions. There were some bits of rubble, some particularly large ones nearby, though they were too far to reach in the same manner mother did. As the resource cost would far outweigh any benefit and as somewhere moving. I was going to have to catch them.
By combining mother's understanding of mortal biology and her large catalog of plants and with a lot more time and effort. I was eventually able to make a type of vine to function a bit like a root and snake at the same time. It used the template of the snake’s muscle movement and digestive system as part of its basic design. While it wasn't actually meant to digest material. it was equipped with a small hardened beak of calcium that once it attached to nearby debris would begin to break it down and swallow it down the vine where it was either absorbed or passed to my root system for later consumption. Meanwhile, the vine would continue to grow wrapping around and expanding to the nearby debris.
Theoretically, it could even grow large enough to swallow the debris hole. Though that was more fantasy than practicality. Meanwhile, the vines would then use the slowly shrinking debris to grow off of and extend further out to grab more and more materials to continue growing and feedback to me. Occasionally on larger debris, I would set small clusters of leaves to grow to add to my ability to process nutrients and feed myself or add another amber I to look for more sources.
While there was plenty of debris nearby it was still finite. It was at this point I began to get a basic understanding of gravity both from mother's understanding on it, and from what I observed. Though the planet had been shattered it had been shattered mostly into seven large chunks. Two of which collided very early on and created a large debris field the third of which I watched as it collided with the original two. The remaining chunks were far smaller and if my vision wasn't wrong, we're slowly being dragged back to the planet.
In theory, if I waited long enough the planet would begin to restore itself. Or at the very least, I'd be pulled back towards larger chunks of material.
I did not have time for that though I could not simply hibernate and let time pass me by, even if the planet pieced itself back together again it wouldn't guarantee my survival for the long term. I could not guarantee I could hibernate long enough for it to succeed. Or how I would return to the planet or how I would survive on the planet once I did. Mother had once witnessed mortals using air to push thin sheets of cloth connected to large wooden vessels. I unfortunately did not have wind I had noticed something similar though. Without the protective atmosphere of a planet, my leaves had nearly burned the first time I reached for the sun. I had to use shadows to grow them. Even catching a faint light was enough though. Reinforcing the vines to function outside of the shadows of debris that I now so desperately needed was not an easy task to say the least. As I needed them to be both flexible and durable enough to survive the harsh light of the void.
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Once I had managed that annoying task I then began working on leaves that could handle the new environment. They weren't cheap so instead I made them larger to get the most out of them. That was when I discovered a unique and useful property. The large leaves had a very faint pull to them desperate to test this I separated from a damaged leaf and watched it drift away. Though before it got out of reach I reclaimed the resources with one of my vines.
Every time a leaf received damage I would test this phenomenon and with it I developed my first plans to expand beyond my small field of debris.
The first seed was expensive to make as it had to be smart enough to think for itself but not smart enough to disobey me. Then perfecting all the needed templates was not easy. The base design was simple for large leaf like sales one for each side of the seed and an ember I in the center so it could navigate by. These small seeds would head to debris fields where they would feed and grow until it was large enough to return with a piece of debris while I would like to make myself mobile and begin hunting down these small debris fields myself. However, mother's husk was far too large for me to move even though it was just a single one of her larger limbs and even though I would eventually consume it in its entirety I could not do so quickly. As I needed, every ounce of her genetic memory I could get. Speeding up my own growth would only cost me valuable knowledge and I was hesitant to strip away what little of the debris I still had access to, to power my own growth until I knew I had a reliable source of new material.
Unable to communicate with the seed, once it was set free I could only watch devoting an amber eye to watch it. Though it was barely within the eye’s field of view, and it took several years for it to reach its destination. I watched as it latched on to the largest safest piece of debris it could find and began to grow consuming its small cradle before moving to the next. By the time it had almost devoured it second cradle and moved to its third, it began the tenuous journey of trying to return to me. It clearly did not have an easy time as whatever had made it reach its destination so quickly was now hindering it upon its return. By the time it returned and dropped of the debris there was barely a fourth of what it had originally taken but it was only its first offering.
As it returned to its original debris field and while I would like to have prioritized my own growth with the material it brought as well as what material I had originally. I instead set to work breaking it all down. I needed more seeds after all this was just the beginning I watched as the second third and fourth and finally the fifth seed set off to their debris fields. I then watched as those fields whittled down to nothing but scraps of material I couldn't make use of. As the once small offerings my seedlings brought me grew larger with each trip the most recent delivery of my first seedling brought me close to a dozen small boulders of material though its debris field was shrinking rapidly as it continued to grow. It would soon have to move on to another field that was far further off as there was no new debris fields nearby.
It was time to focus on making myself somewhat mobile even if it was just a crawl compared to my seedling speed. Any form of mobility would be preferable. I would not abandon mother's husk though, so I began to wrap my vines around mother's husk using the consumed material brought to me by my seeds to in circle the entirety of the husk. I would have to be careful on what parts of that I consumed from this point onward as not to sever my connection. Once the encirclement had been completed, I began to grow 4 massive sail like leaves. Where I had once resembled a tree, I be it barely, as I was growing off of what was left of my mother's husk. I had flattened and rounded my form looking more like a creeping vine or weed. I did not enjoy this, but it was a needed annoyance even after completing my transformation as much as possible it was still not enough to move Mother's husk. However, with the aid of my first seed, I was able to get it moving towards the largest debris field I could locate. Once my first seed had finished, I sent it back to collect my now very confused younger seedlings that had just kept delivering to the spot I was at.
The first seed redirected its siblings before gathering up what they had delivered and bringing it to me as I set to work.
(A.N. Hey Wrecker here Just wanted to give a quick update this story will not be going into the regular rotation. Short version this is actually a Side Story for The Last Guardian it and a few other stories will occasionally pop up. As side stories these are basically just short stories I'm using as a bit of a palette cleanser. Don’t get me wrong I enjoy writing my stories and what I would like to spend more time on some of my other projects not just these weeklies it's nice to do something different every once in a while. Next, I received several people asking about a Patreon and I'm honestly considering it I'm currently trying to get a little bit ahead and write a bit of backlog if I can manage to write a few chapters of my three main stories I will likely put one together. As for this story, our MC and her little seedlings really do need names don't you think I'm currently open to any suggestions? Lastly, I still need three questions to put another chapter in my Q&A story if you have a question, you'd like to ask me or my characters to be answered in the Q&A story please leave them down below with Q&A so I know to add them. With that said thank you for your wonderful comments and kind words this has been wrecker signing off)
