Chapter Three: Communion

By the third month, the map was no longer recognizable.

Borders had stopped meaning anything. Governments issued emergency broadcasts, then went silent. Cities burned not because of riots, but because nature was reclaiming them�"ivy splitting pavement, trees rising through concrete like fists. Entire neighborhoods transformed into silent arboretums where people stood motionless, wrapped in vine, eyes closed, chests barely moving.

They weren’t dead.

They were waiting.

The last functioning satellite feeds showed massive green swaths spreading across Europe and South America, entire forests blooming overnight where there had been none. And the coasts�"Elara didn’t want to think about the coasts. People walking into the ocean, seeds in their mouths, as if to plant something at the bottom of the world.

Verdant Syndrome had stopped pretending it was an illness.

Now it was a revelation.

---

Elara stood before the wall of research she had built�"papers, scans, printouts, photographs, threads of string and thumbtacks like veins in the shape of desperation.

Everything pointed toward one truth:

This was not biological.

Not in the way they understood biology.

Verdant Syndrome wasn’t spreading through touch, air, water, or even genetics.

It was emergent. A signal. A transformation triggered by exposure not to the pathogen, but to the idea of it.

The thoughts themselves were infectious.

The more one understood the Bloom, the closer one came to hearing it.

And those who heard it... changed.

Her own veins now shimmered with the faintest tint of green. Her dreams were laced with pollen dust and spiraling trees.

She hadn’t told Havel.

Not yet.

---

Kaia had stopped speaking in full sentences.

Instead, she sang.

Not loudly. Barely above a whisper. Strange melodies with no discernible language. Sometimes they sounded like wind in tall grass. Other times like insects harmonizing beneath the soil. The tones vibrated in Elara’s chest like guilt she didn’t want to name.

“What are you saying?” Elara asked her one morning.

Kaia tilted her head. Her hair was wild with moss. Petals blinked open along her cheekbones.

“I don’t know,” she said softly. “But it’s not just mine. I think we’re all singing it.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“The ones who’ve begun to listen.”

Kaia stepped toward her. Slowly. Barefoot. The grass beneath her feet perked up as she moved. Flowers tracked her shadow like sunflowers do the light.

“I want to show you something.”

“Kaia…”

“Trust me.”

---

They went into the forest.

Not far, but deep.

Elara clutched her field pack like it might save her. Her breath felt thin. The trees pressed close, not menacing, but watchful.

Kaia led her to a clearing she hadn’t seen before. A perfect circle of earth, ringed with flowering trees that hadn’t existed there days ago.

And at the center�"

People.

Half a dozen of them. Men. Women. Children. All in various stages of transformation. Some with barklike patches across their torsos, others with translucent petals growing from their backs like wings. None of them spoke. They stood still, eyes closed, breathing in sync. A slow, deep rhythm. Like trees in wind.

Kaia joined them.

Elara stayed back.

“What is this?” she whispered.

Kaia opened her eyes�"now veined with gold. Not green. Gold, like sap made of sun.

“A root memory,” she said. “This is how the Earth remembers itself.”

Elara’s knees almost gave. “What the hell does that mean?”

“We think of ourselves as separate. Minds in bodies. But what if we’re nodes? What if all thought is networked?”

Kaia placed a hand on the soil.

The others did the same.

At first, Elara heard nothing.

Then�"a pulse.

Not in her ears. In her chest.

A distant hum. Like a thousand voices murmuring beneath the ground. Words without shape. Feelings that didn’t belong to her but welcomed her.

It was ancient. Not primitive. Not cruel. Just… indifferent.

A vast intelligence that didn’t judge, didn’t punish.

It simply was.

“This is what we’re becoming,” Kaia said. “Less singular. More woven.”

“You’re losing yourself.”

“No. I’m remembering what I was before I was only me.”

Elara backed away.

The trees tilted slightly as if leaning in.

“This isn’t communion,” she whispered. “It’s assimilation.”

Kaia didn’t argue.

She didn’t need to.

The Earth had already made its case.

---

Back in the lab, Elara tried to ground herself in the work.

But her hands shook under the microscope. Every slide now looked like an invitation. Every sequence of DNA was a poem she didn’t understand, but somehow felt.

She considered burning her notes.

She considered burning herself.

Instead, she isolated a new sample�"her own blood. Again.

This time, she injected it into a soil culture from a patient’s greenhouse pod.

She thought nothing would happen.

She was wrong.

The soil moved.

Not quickly. Just... shifted. As if adjusting to her presence.

Then, a sprout.

From the center of the dish, a thin green shoot erupted�"impossibly fast�"then bloomed a single, red-veined leaf.

Red. Like blood.

The leaf turned slightly toward her face, as if looking back.

And Elara, for one long, terrible moment, forgot who she was.

She didn’t move.

Didn’t breathe.

And when she finally exhaled, she whispered aloud�"not to Havel, not to herself, but to it:

“What are you trying to become?”

The leaf trembled.

A seed cracked open.

And somewhere deep beneath the Earth, something answered.

Author's Note

In Communion, I wanted to explore the tension between individual identity and the collective experience. As the world transforms, the lines between self and other begin to blur—what happens when we no longer see ourselves as separate from nature, from each other, or from the forces that shape us? The Earth, in this chapter, speaks not in words, but through sensations, through resonances, through communion. Elara’s journey becomes one of not only resistance but understanding—facing the unsettling possibility that what she fears is also what she longs for.

This chapter is dedicated to those who feel the pulse of the world beneath their feet, and wonder what happens when we finally listen.

– Oghogho Akpeli