Chapter One: Photosynthesis

A Chapter by PA1

The first symptom was sunlight.

Not a rash, not a fever, not even a cough. Just... sunlight.
People started standing in it longer. Not to tan. Not for leisure. But to absorb. At first, Elara Myles thought it was a coincidence. Spring had come early, the city had thawed, and who didn’t want to feel a little warmth after the winter’s iron grip?
But then came the changes. Gradual. Inescapable.
A greenish hue appeared beneath the skin, subtle at first, like bruises caught in the act of becoming. The afflicted�"if that word even fit�"reported an unquenchable thirst for water, and an aversion to meat, to smoke, to concrete. They spoke, increasingly, of dreams filled with vines, of voices whispering in the roots beneath the ground. Some felt euphoric, like they were waking up into a truer version of themselves.
Others simply withered.
Elara stared out the lab window. The greenhouse glass caught the morning sun and threw prisms across the polished floors. Rows of medicinal flora lay in silence, a curated kingdom of chlorophyll and promise. But she wasn’t here for them anymore. She hadn’t touched a petal in months.
Now her focus was locked in quarantine chambers, in refrigerated vials of blood, and the whispering foliage that grew inside people.
Verdant Syndrome. That’s what the media called it. A name meant to sound scientific and poetic, to keep the terror dressed in something green and gentle.
It’s not a virus, she’d told the CDC liaison two weeks ago. Not bacterial. Not fungal.
Then what is it?
It’s… evolutionary. Parasitic. Symbiotic, maybe. Or something else. I don’t know yet.
And she hated not knowing.
She had been a botanist first�"her love of the green world had begun as a girl crawling through the forest behind her family’s home, hands in the dirt, mouth full of the names of trees. Latin felt more natural than English. The pulse of a growing thing, more honest than most people.
But now she was something else. A reluctant virologist, a desperate researcher. Because Verdant Syndrome had taken someone she couldn’t afford to lose.
Her sister.
Kaia Myles had always been wild in the way Elara was disciplined. Bright scarves, dirt on her jeans, hair like wind-tangled moss. She was a schoolteacher�"literature and biology, poetry in the morning and frog dissections by lunch. Students loved her. So did Elara. She had been the one constant in Elara’s otherwise rootless life. Their parents gone early, their childhood stitched together with camping trips and late-night documentaries.
Kaia had been the first person to say the word “Verdant” in their family. Two months ago, she’d called Elara from the woods outside Portland.
“Something’s… happening to me.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No. But I’m changing.”
“Changing how?”
“I feel things in the soil. When I walk barefoot, I swear I can sense the earth listening. And my skin…”
She had sent photos. At first, Elara thought it was some kind of prank. Small buds�"blue, veined, pulsing�"blooming near her collarbone.
But Kaia hadn’t been joking.
Within three weeks, she had vines spiraling beneath her skin like green lightning. She no longer slept through the night. Her breathing slowed to a pace only found in time-lapse videos of growing trees. She no longer ate food. Only drank water. Lots of it. Gallons a day.
“I’m not scared,” Kaia had whispered during their last call.
“You should be.”
“What if this isn’t a sickness? What if it’s a calling?”
“What if it kills you?”
“Then I’ll die in bloom.”
Elara sat now in the sterile chill of Observation Chamber 3, watching a subject through the two-way glass.
Subject 47. Male. Mid-thirties. Former construction worker. Verdant Stage II.
He sat cross-legged on the floor, palms upward. Skin along his arms had cracked into barklike fissures, and from each, small tendrils coiled like gentle snakes. Flowers bloomed from the edges of his eyes�"iris-colored, eerily appropriate. He did not speak, did not resist. He simply sat, face toward the sunlamp, and breathed.
Elara’s colleague, Dr. Jun Havel, stood beside her, arms crossed.
“He’s photosynthesizing,” Havel muttered.
“Don’t anthropomorphize it.”
“He is still human.”
Elara said nothing.
Because she wasn’t sure he was.
The scans were baffling. The man’s nervous system was still intact, though slowed. His brain showed delta-wave activity�"more akin to deep meditation than illness. His veins, however, no longer pumped blood. They now moved something else. A nutrient-rich sap, thick with sugars and chloroplast-rich proteins. Self-sustaining. In theory, he didn’t need a heart anymore. The plant network was doing the work.
Verdant Syndrome wasn’t killing people.
It was rewriting them.
“I think they’re trying to connect to something,” Havel whispered.
“The Earth?”
“Maybe each other.”
That scared her more than anything.
Later that evening, Elara drove to the safehouse where Kaia was being kept.
It was on the edge of the forest, far from the city’s noise. An experimental containment zone. Clean air, constant surveillance, no synthetic chemicals allowed on-site. A haven for the afflicted, or so they told themselves. In truth, it was a lab in disguise.
Kaia was waiting on the porch, barefoot, her skin luminous in the moonlight.
“You look like hell,” Kaia said, smiling.
“You look like a fern.”
“Better than a corpse.”
Elara sat beside her. Listened to the night hum around them. There was something alive in the quiet�"more than animals, more than insects. A rhythm. A breath.
“I think I can hear the trees,” Kaia whispered.
“They’re not speaking to you.”
“Not in words.”
Elara looked at her sister, at the gentle blossoms crowning her cheeks, the emerald veins threading beneath her skin like ivy on marble.
“Kaia, I’m going to fix this.”
“What if it’s not broken?”
Elara didn’t answer.
She stared at the moonlight pooling in the grass, and felt the terrible weight of not knowing which was the better fate:
To remain human.
Or to bloom.

next chapter

© 2025 PA1

Author's Note

The Blooming Veil is a reflection of both the beauty and terror that lies in nature’s unchecked potential. The idea of plants and humans merging through a condition that is both symbiotic and parasitic taps into the very essence of our relationship with the Earth. I wanted to explore how, when pushed to its limits, our connection with the natural world can be both a source of strength and a dangerous unknown. In this story, the characters’ transformations symbolize the fragility of human identity in the face of something much larger and older than ourselves.

This book is dedicated to the wild spaces that still exist, untouched by the chaos of modern life, and to the ways in which we, too, are part of the natural world—whether we like it or not.

– Oghogho Akpeli