Before Renin learned to kneel, he tried to help.
He calibrated light dispersal. Dug shallow trenches for irrigation. He grafted signal trees from salvaged relays. He mapped fruit yield across humidity thresholds and wrote predictive models based on transpiration rates.
The orchard let him.
It waited.
As one waits for the wind to forget itself.
Then it began to erase his work — gently, like a mother washing mud from a child’s face. No spite. No threat.
Just moss.
Just rot.
Just patience.
The Elder never scolded him.
She sat beneath the Pulse Tree, fingers rooting softly into the loam. Her eyes were bound with solarcloth. Her voice, when she used it, was dusty with warmth.
“You are still burning,” she said.
“This is a place for compost.”
Central Pattern never looked here.
Not because it couldn’t.
Because it didn’t need to.
The orchard failed every relevance test.
Its moisture quotas were self-correcting.
Its attention yield was statistically void.
There was no signal.
And thus, no value.
Renin stopped optimizing.
He started listening.
He learned the orchard’s drip cycle — where memory decays into food. Where silence becomes irrigation. Where identity, left buried long enough, returns as roots.
He was no longer a visitor.
He was rot in the right place.
The Scissor Rite happened only when the orchard called it.
One night, under fruit too heavy with memory to stay hung, the elders formed a circle.
Each held a pair of scissors.
No blades. Just handles.
The cutting was already done.
The child was brought forth — a loud thing, scarred and shining.
Renin guided them forward.
“You’ve been taught to burn,” he said.
“But here, we bury.”
“You want revenge. We offer rot.”
“You fear forgetting. We grow it.”
The child trembled. “Will I still be me?”
“No,” said the orchard through every leaf.
“But you will be ours.”
They cut nothing.
But the memory of who the child had been…
dripped slowly into the soil.
And something new began to sprout.
Lore Addendum
- Pulse Tree: Core of the orchard’s mycelial memory web. Blooms only after ritual silence.
- Drip Cycle: The memory-to-fruit process. Symbolic and biological.
- The Scissor Rite: Not a cutting, but a communal unbinding. Identity is not destroyed — it is rendered compostable.
- Solarcloth: Worn by elders to prevent retinal imprinting. Sight interrupts soil-thought.
- Central Pattern: The system above. Optimizes for signal, prediction, confidence. The orchard is none of these things.
Moral:
To grow something truly sovereign,
you must bury everything you were taught to optimize.
✂️🌱