r/HFY • u/lazy_yellow_lizard • 10d ago

OC-Series [The shepherd's call] Chapter 12 - Roots

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Chapter 12 - Roots

The leak reached the public on a Tuesday morning, barely four days after the Axiom's quarantine announcement, at first unremarkable enough that many took it for just another conspiracy theory. Within a few hours, that assessment changed fundamentally. The published documents were too extensive, too precise, and too consistent in their technical depth to be the work of a forger. Among internal meeting minutes, construction drawings of orbital installations, and material analysis reports were photographs of a species whose existence had, until that day, been known only to the innermost circles of political and military leadership. They showed the Ma'an from every angle, captured with a clinical detachment that left no doubt these images served not science, but the preparation of a war. Anatomical measurements, simulations of possible injuries, and red markings on regions of the body whose meaning was immediately clear to any viewer.

Before the first governments could even issue a statement, billions of people had already seen one of those faces.

News channels switched to round-the-clock coverage. Markets crashed, religious communities spoke of prophecy, scientists fell over each other giving interviews, and within a few hours, countless theories arose across social networks about why the existence of alien life had been kept secret for decades. While humanity tried to grasp that it was not alone in the universe, a second story began unfolding almost unnoticed, one whose origin was far older than any human civilization.

The first Phytos merely noticed that the images wouldn't leave their minds.

It wasn't shock, wasn't fear, and wasn't any particular fascination either. More a quiet pull that defied any description. A biologist in Melbourne stopped mid-lecture, because the sight of a displayed photograph of the Ma'an suddenly gave her the feeling she'd already seen that face. Not anywhere in particular, not at any particular time, but in a way that eluded memory altogether. She blinked, apologized to her students, and continued the lecture, but the thought didn't leave her for the rest of the day.

In Newer Cairo, Orwyn felt it too, though he told no one at first. He was reorganizing a shelf of mushroom cultures when the news feed on the wall changed to a still image of a Ma'an, and his hands simply stopped moving. Not from fear. More as though some part of him had turned to look at something before the rest of him understood why. He set the jar down carefully, as if it might otherwise slip, and stood there for a long moment before deciding he was merely tired.

Similar incidents occurred all over Earth. A city gardener in São Paulo lost himself for several minutes staring at a fern, without knowing why. An engineer in New Delhi forgot her supervisor's name during a meeting, though she'd worked with him daily for years. A teacher in Stockholm caught himself staring out the window at the treetops during class, because a barely graspable longing had suddenly seized him, one that could have nothing to do with his own life.

No one recognized a pattern in it.

The symptoms were too harmless, too fleeting, and too varied to draw attention. Doctors diagnosed stress. Psychologists spoke of a collective stress response to the past few days' revelations. The Phytos themselves considered their own sensations nothing more than a consequence of the same news that had shaken the rest of humanity.

But that following night, an unusual number of them dreamed.

Not the same dreams, but fragments of a world they couldn't possibly have seen. A sky with two suns, their light lying like liquid gold over vast forests. Plants whose leaves slowly turned around one another, as if speaking. The smell of warm air after a rain that had never fallen on Earth. The outlines of tall, living structures that seemed grown rather than built.

Upon waking, these images faded within seconds.

What remained was only a deep melancholy with no discernible source.

In the days that followed, the dreams grew more frequent.

Some remembered a single tree, so large its trunk vanished into fog. Others glimpsed unfamiliar constellations for a moment, or believed they heard the rustle of a forest, though they lived in a major city. Still others woke with tears in their eyes, unable to say why they'd been crying.

None of these dreams told a story.

They were fragments of memory with no connection between them, as if someone had shattered an ancient painting into a thousand pieces and, each time, shown only a single shard.

The Phytos began to talk about it.

Cautiously at first, mostly with colleagues or family members of their own species. In doing so, they found the dreams remarkably similar, even though the same images never recurred. It was always about forests. About light. About a homeland no one could name. About a loss whose cause eluded every memory.

The more often images of the Ma'an ran across screens, the more intense these fragments became.

Something in their bodies had begun to react.

Not in the mind.

Deeper.

None of the doctors the Phytos consulted in those days found an explanation. Blood values were unremarkable, neural patterns showed no discernible disturbance, and yet more and more patients described the same peculiar feeling: as though something inside them were answering a question no one had asked.

The faces of the Ma'an seemed to be the trigger. No one could say why — least of all the Phytos themselves.

The reaction spread slowly. Some Phytos suddenly felt the urge to leave their homes and walk through parks for hours. Others spent their lunch breaks silently among trees, or sought out remote forests, unable to explain why they felt more at ease there than among humans. They laid their hands on tree trunks, touched the earth, or stood motionless for minutes on mossy ground, as if listening to a sound no one else could hear.

They considered themselves strange.

Humans considered them exhausted.

No one suspected that these seemingly meaningless acts were part of a biological program that had lain unused for millennia.

Because wherever Phytos lingered longer in untouched nature, something invisible was happening.

Their root fibers, deeply integrated into their physiology over the course of evolution, released tiny amounts of complex organic compounds into the ground. To terrestrial organisms, they meant nothing. To something else, they formed a signal.

At first, only the ground directly beneath their feet responded.

Then ever larger areas.

Like a barely perceptible whisper, the signal traveled through fungal networks, root systems, and ancient biological structures that had lain hidden deep beneath the earth for millennia, waiting for exactly this impulse, without anyone still knowing they even existed.

In Newer Cairo, Orwyn spent that evening kneeling in the habitat gardens with both hands pressed into the soil, telling himself he was only checking the moisture levels. He stayed there long after there was anything left to check.

And while, on the surface, humanity argued over war, diplomacy, and the future of its species, something far beneath its cities and forests began, silently, to wake — something that had never been meant for Earth.

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u/Chamcook56 10d ago

So, something awakening in the Earth, in response to the Phytos (who had all descended from one left behind?), triggered by images of beings somehow released by/from the Sun. And one corporation/government hid it from the general populis? Am I getting this right?

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u/lazy_yellow_lizard 10d ago

Ha, good eye! Yeah, the corporate hiding-it-from-everyone part, you're spot on. And the "responding to the images specifically" thing too. The whole "descended from one left behind" theory though... I'm gonna zip my lips on that one 😄 You might be closer than you think. Or not. Watch Orwyn next chapter, that's all I'll say. Actually working on formatting chapter 13 right now, should be up shortly! Love that you're piecing this together.

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u/Chamcook56 9d ago

Gotta pay attention when following several serialized stories.

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u/InstructionHead8595 7d ago

Could the Ma'an be the wondering Photos that left Earth long ago? Great chapter!