​The Low End

So we’re back. You’re listening to The Low End, I’m your host, and sitting across from me doing that thing with her fantastic ears where she pretends she’s not judging me is my cohost Syl, who is, as always, perfect and elven and wrong about almost everything.

I have never once been wrong.

You’ve never once admitted it. Different thing. Anyway. We got a lot of letters this week after last show’s segment on rootwork, and Syl said something on air that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. You said, what was it, you said your people have been doing rootwork for centuries and it’s about respect for the plant and intention and all that. And I didn’t push back because I didn’t feel like getting into it on the air, but it’s been sitting in me all week like a stone, and tonight I want to tell you why.

Oh, he’s got that voice on folks. Listeners, if you’re new to the show, this is the part where he throws out the runsheet and we don’t see it again for an hour. If you’re not new, you already have your drink poured. Alright, I’ll bite. What are you talking about?

Look, you asked me why I don’t do rootwork. You asked me why I won’t touch anything that comes out of the ground in the Flay. Your people have been chewing duskpetal since before mine learned to walk upright, so I get it. You think I’m being dramatic. You think it’s a human thing, the fear. And maybe it is. Maybe that’s the whole point.

Oh, we’re doing this tonight?

Yeah. We’re doing this tonight. Because I think you need to hear it. And I think they need to hear it. Everybody tuning in right now, get comfortable. This one’s gonna take a while.

Should I be worried?

Probably.

———

Alright so here’s a life-altering experience for whoever’s listening… I don’t know you, you don’t know me, but I figure somebody out there needs to hear this before they go and do what I did. Consider this a public service. Or a confession. Or whatever you want to call it when a man stands up and says hey, I walked through the stupidest door of my life and here’s what was on the other side.

So let’s go back. Late summer, the turn the Grainfather’s canal flooded. You remember that? The whole Sullen District smelling like wet copper for months? Yeah, that turn. I was nineteen turns born. Just finished my first term at the Attestory, which, if you don’t know, is basically where families with just enough coin send their kids to feel like they’re doing something about their futures when they’re really not. My father thought I was wasting my time. He told me this constantly. Not angry, either. That was the thing. Just…disappointed. Like the weather. Like rain. Can’t argue with rain. You just get wet.

Anyway, I didn’t care. What I cared about was getting the hell out of Cherid Fel. My friend Tar, right, he had a cousin out in Thresser’s Landing who had real work. Quarry scaffolding. Hard, honest, good-pay-type work, four hundred miles east along the Blackvein. Far enough from home that my father’s opinions would have to come by letter, and letters, see, letters you can burn. The plan was simple. Leave home. Hit the road. Stop in Marchbanks for a few days to link up with Tar, who was crashing at his girl Cosette’s place in the shoppers’ quarter. Then push east to the Landing and start a real life.

The day I left? Man. The day I walked out through the east gate with my pack on and the road stretching out? I felt something crack open in my chest. Like a bone getting set that nobody told me was broken. I laughed out loud on the road like a crazy person. A merchant with a mule cart gave me a look. I did not care. I was free. First time in my life. That feeling…I can’t hand it to you but if I could I would. It was the closest thing to holy I’ve ever felt sober.

Alright boom, the stage is set…

Now. Marchbanks. Let me tell you about Marchbanks in late summer because it’s important to the story. Marchbanks sits in this bowl between two ridgelines and in the summer the heat just collects. Like water in a cupped hand. It doesn’t move. The air doesn’t move. The river goes the color of old tea and the whole city smells like tannin and sweat and the oppressive funk of ten thousand people who have completely given up on being comfortable. I arrived in the afternoon and by the time I found Cosette’s building I was soaked through and my throat felt like I’d been chewing sand. Hottest summer that city had seen in years. That’s gonna be relevant later. Remember the heat.

Cosette’s mother, lovely woman. Tall, silver coming in at the temples, the kind of person who’s seen enough of the world to stop being surprised by it. She let me in, pointed at a water basin and a clean towel, said nothing else. I loved her immediately. Tar was there. We thugged it out. Cosette was there too, small and sharp and loud in the most entertaining way possible. Good people. We sat on the floor and passed a pipe around and caught up on the summer. Easy stories. Nobody getting hurt. The kind of night where you’re just glad to be in a room with people you chose.

Then somebody goes hey let’s go out.

Cosette knew a guy. Kind of guy that says “call me Fifth” and you understand he’s been pleading it his whole life, like he parceled himself out long ago and this is just the share you’re allowed. Anyway, Fifth, he lived in one of those tenements on the far side of the quarter, you know the type, forty or fifty young people crammed into one building all in various stages of bad decisions. He had access to a courtyard with a well and enough space for a gathering. So we went. I wore my light trousers and left my coin and papers in my pack at Cosette’s place. Remember that detail. That decision right there probably saved my entire situation later. Sometimes the gods look out for you before you even know you need looking out for.

So we get there. I meet Fifth, who is fine, he’s somebody’s boyfriend, whatever. The courtyard is nice. People are pulling water from the well and passing wineskins and some guy’s playing a drum badly but with his whole heart, you know, and as the sun goes down the crowd grows and grows. Dockworkers, students, Wyldfolk, Mimics and Rumors, soldiers on leave with their belt knives still on, a group of tanners’ daughters who smelled like chemicals and did not give a single damn about it. There were even a couple lord-elves in the mix, which, if you know elves, you know what that means. Those people don’t come down for just anything. I couldn’t have been happier. This was it. This was the thing I left home for. Strangers becoming temporary friends. Everyone loosened up by the heat and the wine. That beautiful permission you get when you’re somewhere nobody knows your full name.

For a while it was beautiful. Just beautiful.

Then two guys get into it. Over what, I never found out and it doesn’t matter. One of them pulls a knife. Somebody near the back yells “he’s got a blade” and the whole courtyard just shatters. Everyone scatters. We end up inside Fifth’s apartment, maybe thirteen people crammed into a room built for four. Door shuts. Drum stops. And then slowly, the way weather changes, the fear drains out and what replaces it is that stupid reckless giddiness you get when you just dodged something bad and your blood is still up. Someone pulls out a pipe. Someone’s got more wine. Okay. We’re good. We’re back.

I looked around that room. I didn’t know a single soul except Tar and Cosette. But everyone seemed cool. Everyone seemed like the kind of person you’d be fine waking up next to on a floor.

That was my first mistake. Getting comfortable.

The second mistake walked through the door about twenty minutes later. Older guy. Thirty, thirty-five, hard to say. Weathered face, the kind you get from being outdoors a lot or from being on something a lot, and I couldn’t tell you which. Carrying a leather satchel. And he had this energy…you know the energy…the energy of a man who knows something the room doesn’t and is taking his time with it. He sits down. Opens the satchel. Takes out a cloth bundle, unwraps it, and inside, seeds. Small and dark little things. Maybe a hundred of them sitting there in the cloth looking like nothing special.

“This,” he says, “is blackroot. Grows wild out in the Flay. You take a dose of this, you’ll see the other side of the world for two, maybe three days. Usually I charge forty selvers for a handful.” He pauses. Smiles. “But tonight’s free.”

That’s right, friends. Enter blackroot onto the stage.

Now look. Let me say something right here. If you are ever, EVER in a room and somebody offers you something for free that they usually charge money for? Leave. I don’t care what it is. I don’t care how good you feel. I don’t care if the wine is warm in you and you’re nineteen and feel immortal and four hundred miles from anyone who’d say no. Leave the room. Just get up and go.

I wish I left the room. At least, I didn’t take it right away either. Some little animal part of my brain, some instinct that was still working underneath the wine, said wait. Watch. So I held the seeds in my hand and I watched. Two guys took theirs immediately. Chewed and swallowed, no hesitation. One of them washed it down with wine. They sat back with that look, you know, the “I’ve done this before” look, except I don’t think either of them had done this before. I think they just didn’t want to look scared.

About ten minutes pass. First guy stops talking. And I mean stops. Mid-sentence. He’d been loud, animated, telling some story about dock work, and then, boom, nothing. His eyes go to the wall and stay there. He wasn’t looking at the wall. He was looking at whatever the wall had become. People start saying his name, touching his shoulder. Nothing. This man had left. His body was in the room but he had vacated the premises. You could see it in his face the way you can see an empty house from the street. Lights out. Nobody home.

Then he snaps back. All at once. Like a door getting kicked open. He leaps up, eyes wild, enormous, and I watch this man realize what is about to happen to him. Pure recognition. Pure terror. And he runs. Out the door. Gone. We found out later he made it to his own room upstairs, locked himself in, and spent the next two days destroying everything he owned while screaming at people who weren’t there.

Two days, ya’ll.

Second guy. Stands up slow, careful, like the floor has become unreliable. And then walks directly into the wall. Full speed. Like it wasn’t there. Bounces off. Does it again. People grab him and it’s like trying to hold down a horse. This guy had strength that made no sense for his size. Whatever was in his muscles had been completely disconnected from whatever usually tells a person how much force to use. They get him down and he’s thrashing and his eyes are open and he’s seeing things none of us are seeing and his mouth is making sounds that aren’t words in any language I’ve ever heard. And then he started laughing, and this look settled on his face and he laid there, no longer resisting but twitching. Whatever world he was in, it had no walls and no witnesses and I couldn’t tell if he was content to be there or trying to escape.

The guy told us this was normal, that he was feeling it, ascending, that we shouldn’t touch him. Good vibes only, he said, don’t kill his high.

I look down at my hands, at the seeds. I had all the information I needed. All of it. Two living demonstrations of exactly what was about to happen to me if I put those seeds in my mouth. A reasonable person, a person with any sense at all, would have opened their hand and let the seeds fall and walked out and gone back to Cosette’s and laid down and been grateful in the morning. A part of me said, “bones and rubbish man, you’re bloody young, live a little.”

Bones and rubbish. I ate them.

I know. I KNOW. But I was nineteen and stupid and the wine was in me and I’d just survived a knife fight in a courtyard and I felt invincible. I chewed those seeds up and washed them down and even as I swallowed I felt the decision close behind me like a door.

Five minutes later, I know I’m fucked.

My stomach, gods, my stomach. You know nausea, right? Everyone’s been nauseous. This wasn’t nausea. Nausea is a feeling. This was my body making a mechanical decision without consulting me. My body identified what I’d eaten and went absolutely not, and it turned itself inside out. I ran to the basin in the corner and I emptied everything. Wine, dinner, seeds, stuff I didn’t even know was in me. My body wrung itself out like a rag. And I think, I genuinely think, this is why I’m still alive. If I’d kept the full dose down? I don’t know. I don’t think I’d be here telling you about it.

I came back to the room and my legs weren’t working right. Like the signals between my brain and my muscles were arriving out of order. Every step was a negotiation. I hit the wall and leaned on it and Cosette’s in front of me going “are you okay? are you okay?” and I try to answer but my tongue doesn’t work. I can feel it in my mouth. Just lying there. Like a piece of meat. But I can’t make it do the thing tongues do.

Then the insects start. Oh god. The insects. Under my skin. Not on me. IN me. Crawling. Hundreds of them. In my arms and my legs and up the back of my neck. I could feel individual legs. I knew they weren’t real. Some part of me knew. But my skin didn’t know. And my hands started clawing at my arms trying to dig them out, trying to open myself up, and I could see the scratches and the thin lines of blood appearing and I knew I was hurting myself and I could not stop. Last thing I remember clearly: standing up. The room tilting. The door. Going through it.

Then… blackness.

I don’t know what happened after that. It was like being in a dream. No. Not a dream. Dreams have some kind of logic, right? Some kind of thread? This was like…pieces of a dream that got dropped on the floor and swept into a pile. Shapes that looked like people but dissolved when I looked at them directly. Tar appeared beside me at some point which was impossible because Tar was building a fucking pillow fort on the other side of the room. But I remember grabbing his arm and talking to him, telling him everything, asking him why he didn’t come find me. He listened. He nodded. Then I blinked and he wasn’t there and my hand was gripping air and my mouth was still moving and I was alone on a street I didn’t recognize talking to absolutely nobody.

My memories of this time are kinda like walking through fog, nothing was solid. Nothing stayed. I was there for all of it and present for none of it.

This kept happening. Friends appearing, full conversations, and then, poof, gone. And the thing that really messes with me, the thing I still can’t let go of, is the not knowing. My body was out there in the world doing things. Walking, talking, going places. People saw me. People interacted with whatever I was during those hours. And I have no memory of any of it. None. There’s a version of me that existed that night that I have never met and never will, and that version was doing things I can’t account for, and I just have to live with that.

So. I wake up. Morning. Stone floor. I’m curled up in a ball. And I am completely, entirely naked. Where are my clothes? No idea. When did they come off? No idea. Where am I? Not a clue. Certainly, not Fifth’s apartment. Some kind of storeroom. Barrels along one wall. A high window with light coming through it that feels like it’s cutting into me. My eyes are destroyed. Dry, swollen, everything is a bright haze.

And here’s the really scary part. Here’s the part that gets me more than anything else. I felt amazing. I felt WONDERFUL. This deep, warm, sourceless joy flooding through me. The room was beautiful. The light was beautiful. The barrels were beautiful. Everything was holy and luminous and I was lying naked on a cold stone floor in a building I’d never been in before in a city I barely knew and I was so happy I could have cried. That’s what blackroot does. That’s the part nobody tells you. It doesn’t just take your mind. It replaces what it takes with something that feels like grace. So you don’t fight it. So you don’t even want to come back. It steals everything and leaves you a feeling so good you forget you’ve been robbed.

Then I hear footsteps. And in walk three men. One’s middle-aged, heavyset, looks annoyed. The other two? City watch. Armed. Hands on their belts in that way that means business. Now, a reasonable person would be scared. I was fascinated. I was watching all of this happen to me like it was happening to someone else across the room. The whole thing felt theoretical. Like, yeah, I can see that this is bad, conceptually.

They ask me questions. Sounds come out of my mouth. They seem satisfied with the sounds. A watchman grabs a sheet from somewhere and wraps it around me and I look down at myself in this sheet and I think I look like one of those old prophets from the paintings at the Attestory, the ones who wander the desert in robes, and I think this is the funniest thing that has ever happened to anyone.

They put irons on my wrists. I don’t resist. Resisting would require a level of engagement with reality that I simply do not have at this point. I am a passenger in my own body. I try to make friendly conversation with the watchmen. I ask them, genuinely curious, like we’re at a dinner party, what exactly I’ve done. They don’t answer. I am not bothered by this. I talk to the guy walking next to me instead, a fellow who looks exactly like a boy I knew at the Attestory. We have a pleasant chat. Then he disappears. Just isn’t there anymore. And I note this and keep walking.

They ask me what I took. And I hear myself, from somewhere very far away, say that I just drank too much wine at a gathering and things got out of hand. The root had me so far gone I couldn’t have told you my mother’s name but some survival instinct buried so deep the root couldn’t reach it, it lied for me. Because I couldn’t lie for myself. That little animal brain, man. It saved me from spending a week in the Dim Ward, you know, the place they send people who have gone soft in the head.

They put me in a cell. Stone walls, iron door, a bench, a bucket. Ya’ll… being locked in a small room while blackroot is still in you is something to behold. I immediately realized my situation, and got ‘serious’ in a dissociated sort of way. It was the first time I had ever been locked up, but the emotional impact of this was lost on me, as I was totally oblivious to everything. It was like the feeling you get when you wake up out of a deep sleep, you know, that ‘out of it’ feeling? It was like that, except about 100 times stronger. I tried to get my faculties in order, but was tripping so hard still, I couldn’t do anything but wait. And while I wait the walls are alive, I’m not even trying to be poetic. They’re alive and they move. This slow, rhythmic, expanding and contracting, and I can HEAR it, this low wet sound like lungs, and I’m sitting on this bench watching the room come alive and I’m thinking I’ve been swallowed. I’m inside something living. And I’m not scared because the root won’t let me be scared. Fear requires a self to feel it and the root had put my self away somewhere I couldn’t find it.

I was in there from morning to night. Food came through a slot at some point. It was terrible. I ate it. That survival instinct again, still working, keeping the body fueled while the mind was on vacation in another dimension. As the hours passed the root started letting go. Slowly. In stages. Like waking up from a deep sleep in a room you’ve never been in. And as it let go the euphoria drained and what replaced it…

What replaced it was the worst fear I have ever felt in my life.

Because now I could feel things again. Now the cell was a cell and the irons were real and I was in a place they put criminals and I didn’t know what I’d done to get there. I sat on that bench and my mind went to the worst places. Did I hurt someone? Did I kill someone? Did I do something that can’t be undone? I ran my hands over my body looking for evidence. Cuts, scrapes, abrasions I didn’t remember getting. Every one of them a question I couldn’t answer. That fear. That’s the worst part of the whole experience. Worse than the hallucinations. Worse than the insects under my skin. Worse than waking up naked. The fear of what you did while you were gone from yourself. You carry that. Forever. Even after you find out the answer, you carry the hours when you didn’t know.

They let me out at night. Chained me to a line of other people. Walked us to a room where a magistrate sat behind a desk looking bored. She goes down the list. Gets to my name. I stop breathing.

The charge: public disturbance.

Public disturbance. That’s it.

The relief that hit me… and then immediately the sickness, because the fact that I felt relief at “public disturbance” means I was prepared for something much, much worse, and the fact that I HAD to be prepared for something worse because I had no idea what I’d done? That’s the indictment right there.

They give me clothes. Rough linen stuff that doesn’t fit, shoes that aren’t mine. A guard walks us to the gate, lets us out, makes a joke. “Bet ya’ll are going straight to the wine, huh?” He looks at me specifically. “What in the world happened to you?” I say I don’t know. Everyone laughs. I laugh too. What else do you do? You laugh. Because the alternative is standing in the street in borrowed shoes with no money and no memory screaming until something breaks, and nobody needs to see that.

So now I’m out. Night. Heat still pressing down. And the root? Oh man, that bloody root ain’t done with me.

I thought the worst was over, right? I threw up most of the dose, I slept it off in a cell, I’m free, it should be winding down.

Nah.

Tar appears next to me on the street. Clear as day. I start talking to him, telling him everything, asking why he didn’t come looking for me. He listens. He nods. I blink. He’s gone. I’m talking to air. This happens over and over. The root is doing something deliberate. It’s showing me the shape of companionship without the substance. Building people and handing them to me and snatching them away. Over and over. Teaching me that everything I rely on can vanish between blinks.

I walk for hours. I walk out of the parts of Marchbanks I know into parts where I would normally be terrified just driving through. Dark alleys. Low buildings. The kind of streets where the people on them at night are desperate or dangerous. I felt no fear. None. Because the root had removed it or relocated it, I don’t know. But around me, close, at the edges of my vision… presences… not the fake friends. Something else. Like older. Moving with me like shadows. And I understood, without anyone telling me, that they were keeping me alive. Ancestors. Spirits. The last working pieces of my own survival instinct dressed up and given faces. I don’t know what they were. But they walked me through parts of the night that should have killed me.

And the whole time? I was alone. Whatever I was seeing, I was alone.

Dawn. And with it, the heat. And the thirst. Oh god, the thirst. Blackroot pulls the water out of you. It takes everything wet and uses it and leaves you hollow and cracking. My tongue was dead. My lips were split. My eyes felt packed with sand. I’d nearly died of the heat once already that summer and I could feel my body sliding toward that edge again. Difference was, this time I’d done it to myself.

I drank from gutters. From a horse trough. From a public fountain that was half-dry and green with slime. I know, let’s not dwell on it. The water tasted like copper and refuse and I drank it like it was the finest wine in Cherid Fel because it was wet and wet was all that mattered. If I stopped drinking, I would die. Not “might.” Would. The heat and the root together were killing me by degrees and the only thing keeping me vertical was finding water every few minutes. Then a memory surfaces. Just one. Like a bubble coming up through mud. The name of Cosette’s street.

I ask everyone I meet. Most of them take one look at me and back away. I must have been a sight. Barefoot, sunburned, wearing a stranger’s clothes, eyes blown, lips cracked, talking to people who kept disappearing. But someone tells me. Someone says “it’s about three miles east, follow the main road.”

Three miles. In that heat. No shade. No water. The sun directly overhead like a hand on the top of my skull. I walk. I walk the way dying things walk. My body making decisions my mind stopped participating in. One foot, then the other, then the first one again. I can feel myself shutting down. Systems going dark. Vision narrowing. Sound going far away. The presences that had been with me all night? Gone. I was alone and I was dying and I knew it the way you know your own name.

Then a voice.

“Hey! Hey man, come over here. You look terrible. Come get some water.”

I look. A work crew. Men repairing a wall along the road. And one of them, a broad guy with dark skin hardened like rock and kind eyes, waving me over to a water jug. I walk toward him. I am fully expecting him to vanish like every other person I’ve talked to in the last two days. I reach for the jug. It’s real.

The water is real and it’s cold. It pours into me and my body grabs onto it with a gratitude so deep it’s almost religious. I look at this man who just saved my life and I recognize him. Not physically, but like his presence, you know. He was one of the ones walking with me in the dark. Except he’s real. He’s standing here with mortar on his hands and a jug of water and he called out to a stranger who looked like he was dying and said come here and drink.

I don’t know his name, I wish I’d had the presence of mind to ask. I think about him all the time.

He tells me Cosette’s street is close, a couple blocks. I stagger the rest of the way, find the building, climb the stairs, knock. Tar opens the door. And his face does the thing. You know the thing. The face of a person seeing someone they thought was dead, because that’s what I was. They thought I was dead. They’d looked. They’d asked around. Nobody knew where I was. I’d been gone three days. Three days of this man-shaped thing that used to be me wandering around Marchbanks naked and raving and getting arrested and sleeping under bridges and drinking from gutters. Three days I will never get back and never remember and never be able to account for.

I fell. Floor coming up. Tar’s arms. Cosette’s voice. Then nothing. Real nothing this time. The nothing of a body that’s been pushed past every limit and finally given permission to stop.

I bet you want to know the aftermath. I can’t believe you’ve stuck around this far, but sit tight, friend, I’ll tell you.

Seven days to get back to normal. My body was wrecked. Cuts, scrapes, bruises everywhere. I’d been falling the whole time. Running into things, hitting the ground, getting back up through some mechanism that had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the root not letting the body it was borrowing sit still.

I pieced together what I could from people who were at the gathering. After I ran out of Fifth’s apartment I apparently stripped naked in the courtyard. Took every damn thing off. Then I spent some amount of time running in and out of people’s apartments, busting in, saying things loudly and with great conviction, then running out again. What got the Watch called was me going door to door declaring things about myself that were not true. Loudly. Nakedly. At two in the morning.

So I didn’t do anything too terrible. Thank the gods. The worst part was what it cost other people. Fifth got kicked out of his tenement because of that, because of me I think. Landlord pointed to the Watch report and said anyone associated with this is gone. And when I went to apologize, expecting him to be furious? He just looked at me with this tired acceptance and said “could’ve been any of us.” And that was true and it was kind and it made me feel worse than anger would have. Kindness you haven’t earned is heavier than anger you have.

They gave him two and a half weeks to “get his shit and get the fuck out.” Verbatim. As I helped Fifth move his stuff, people in the building recognized me. Leaning out of windows, calling down from doorways. “Wild night, huh?” “Nice show the other night.” Laughing. Smiling. Like it was a funny story. And I laughed too because from the outside that’s what it was. A kid who got too messed up and did some stupid stuff. Funny story. Great story.

From the inside it’s a man who lost custody of his own body for three days and doesn’t know what that body did while he was gone.

I will never touch blackroot. Never. I am not saying this to preach. I am not saying this to sound wise. I’m saying this because I was a kid and I was lucky. That’s it. That’s the whole difference between my story and a different kind of story. The kind that doesn’t get told because there’s nobody left to tell it. The root shows you the other side. I believe that. The presences, the breathing walls, the dissolving faces… I believe those things were real in some way I can’t explain. But the passage to the other side goes through your body. It uses you as a door. It opens you up and walks through and while it’s walking through, you are not home. You’re somewhere far away watching. And your body is out in the world doing things you’ll never remember and you will carry the weight of those lost hours for the rest of your life.

It took me a week to walk without a cane. It took me longer than that to sleep through the night without waking up on the floor of that storeroom. Cosette made me soup. Tar sat with me. My body healed. My mind did something different. It didn’t heal…it rearranged. Took the whole experience and put it somewhere I can access but don’t enjoy visiting. Like a knife in a drawer you don’t open much but you know exactly where it is and you know it’s sharp.

I’m telling you all this from years away. From distance. From a body that’s been kind to me despite what I put it through. I’m telling you because the man with the satchel is out there. Or someone like him. And the seeds are still in the ground. And somewhere tonight, right now, someone young or old is far from home and someone is saying here, try this, it’s free, and the wine is warm and the night feels like it belongs to them.

I beg you, leave it be.

I didn’t. And I lived. But some nights I lie in the dark and I think about the version of me that walked those streets, naked and raving and so, so happy, and I wonder what he saw and what he said and who he was. I wonder if he’s still out there somewhere in the Marchbanks dark, walking, looking for a way back into a body that already moved on without him.

Be careful, ya’ll. Stay away from the root. Some of us only come back by accident.

———

Dead air. He could hear the hum of the broadcast crystal and the faint crackle of the frequency holding and Syl’s breath across the table.

She didn’t say anything for a long time. Which, if you’ve ever met an elf, you know that’s not how they work. They always have something. A correction. A reframing. A gentle reminder that their people figured this out millennia ago. But she just sat there.

Then, quietly, You should have died.

“Yeah. Probably.”

My cousin took blackroot once. Half of what you described. She lay down in a meadow outside Aereth and she did not get back up. A pause. She was two hundred years old. Had done rootwork her whole life. She knew the plant. She respected it. And it killed her in an afternoon.

He didn’t say anything.

What is it in you people that refuses to stop? Her voice had a catch in it he’d never heard before.

He leaned back in his chair. He’d never said any of this out loud before. He’d done two hundred episodes from this seat and never once let the room go this quiet. He looked at the broadcast crystal pulsing its soft amber light, carrying his voice and hers out to whoever was listening in the dark.

“I don’t know. But it’s in there. Deeper than the root can go.”

More dead air. Then Syl leaned into the crystal.

To everyone listening. Stay away from blackroot. She glanced at him. Even if you’re human. Especially if you’re human. You may survive it. But you will not come back the same.

“That’s the show, ya’ll. This has been The Low End. Be safe out there. And if somebody offers you something for free that they usually charge for…”

Leave the room.

“Leave the room. And as always, do not forget to be while you’re becoming.”

He’d ended the show on that stupidly nonsense tag two hundred times, but tonight it felt like it meant something.

“Goodnight.”