The Evergrowth Grove

The soil in the Evergrowth Grove came from another world. Every handful of it rode to Trisurus inside a transplantation pod, wrapped around the roots of a mandrake who could not survive without it, and when the pods were opened eleven centuries ago the soil was gathered up and laid here. It is the only ground in the system where Evergrowth still grows.

The Grove is one of the oldest of the Memorial Forests on Trisurus Prime. Most memorial groves are reconstructions, built by Arcis ecologists from survey samples and records. This one was planted by its own refugees, and it remains in their keeping. The Arcis grove-family that holds its formal charter treats the arrangement as an honor and stays out of the way.

The Memorial Path

A single path runs through the outer Grove, open to the public from dawn to dusk. It winds between shaped trees that the first refugees coaxed into the forms of Evergrowth's lost grove-cities: arches, low domes, and long colonnades of trunks grown so close together they read as walls. Small markers in the soil carry the names of mandrakes who died in the collapse. There are nearly a hundred million names, written in root-script, and most visitors never notice they are walking on them.

Visitors tend to describe the path as quiet in a way they cannot explain. Mandrake music is played through the ground and felt rather than heard, and the Grove is almost never silent beneath the surface. Animal-bodied guests often report a mild pressure behind the eyes, or an urge to stand still, or a sudden memory of someone they lost.

Mandrake caretakers and their apprentices sell wicker charms near the path's entrance, woven from Grove fiber. The charms are traditional gifts for the grieving, for travelers, and for luck. The faith does not price them. Buyers pay what they think the charm is worth, a custom that works well with the bereaved and less well with everyone else.

The Inner Grove

Past the memorial path, the Grove closes. The inner Grove is reserved for the faithful of the Faith of the World Tree, and its boundary is marked only by a change in the soil that mandrakes can feel and others cannot. Trisuran visitors are asked to turn back at a ring of white-barked trees. Almost all of them do.

At the heart of the inner Grove, rooted in the deepest bed of Evergrowth soil, stands the Lumen. The Lumen has not walked in living memory. Caretakers come and go around the Lumen's roots on a schedule measured in seasons, and the Grove's whole root-network bends toward that center the way a field of flowers bends toward light.

A handful of apprentices live in the inner Grove year-round, sleeping in shaped hollows and tending the soil. They are the only residents. The Grove has no buildings, no lighting, and no Consortium infrastructure beyond a single emergency fire suppression line along its outer edge, installed after a recent incident.