How can one tell that they do not have eyes when they have never seen? How would one articulate a sound when they have never heard, nor can they speak? And how would you think when you can not live? How long was it alive inside of that tree before it answered those questions?
At some point over the next few centuries, as Richardsville grew into a bustling riverside city, The God’s Mangrove in the center, as it was named upon reaching what was assumed to be its mature size, was a center of the community. Children played in it, adults prayed through it, and visitors made a point to look at it for the bragging rights of saying that they had come as close to The Praying Mangrove as it was possible for the average person to do. Certain Priests and Mages made detours to examine the tree as well, but had concluded that it represented only sentimental value to the world; whatever magic may have lay in The Praying Mangrove, which most considered to also be sentimental at best, did not carry over to its offspring. It was a pretty, albeit large, mangrove tree that represented the origin of the Richardsville name. It need not be more, after all, Richardsville was a town that existed on commerce, using its place along the river in between the much larger cities of Minga and Berl to act as a location for resupply and rest for merchants and travelers. A place like this needed no more excitement than what the visitors brought, let alone supernatural nonsense.
But deep inside of the tree, something else grew. Something resembling the mind of a child in the womb, with an exercising ‘brain’ and nothing to train itself on, found itself to be growing and spreading and developing without obvious cause or reason. The darkness it found itself in was so omnipresent that it likely did not realize that it was it for many years, and it did not realize that it truly existed for many years after that. Even once it did, whatever sentient mind it had was only capable of a vague recognition of its own existence. There was no sense of hunger or stress or biological need to drive it to learn or grow, and there was no stimulation to learn or develop on.
At one point, likely a century or so after this entity was first born, its consciousness developed enough to recognize that it existed in a void. This is the most approximate wording to what it thought, as it’s impossible to find words for a wordless being in a non-existent space, but the important fact is that it became self-conscious and active. It could move in a space where space did not exist, think in a space where nothing that made thoughts existed, and recognize itself when it effectively had no self. At some point, it became evident that this entity, trapped in a bizarre space due to bizarre circumstances, was held aloft by a mind that was fundamentally human mind beneath its naivety and deprivation. And humanity loathes a void.
The entity began to develop in such a way as to define its surroundings, inventing a language for itself that would allow it to escape this void. It separated the light and the dark with a straight line that it would, had it known our language, defined as an arm. Then, it imagined a blobby, malformed ‘body’ for itself. It then stepped outside of the body, creating an observer and an observed; some kind of limited validation as to the ‘existence’ of this space it lived in. The lit portions were populated with rudimentary shapes and objects, populated out of thin air in an attempt to create some kind of stimulation. However, this only allowed the entity to feel frustration. And out of its frustration came a fundamentally human feeling, some kind of hope. It had no idea what ‘more’ might have looked like, but it knew that ‘more’ had to exist. It could not be the sole thing that felt this way, nor could it even be the sole thing. If that had been the case, then it would have suffered in a way so incomprehensible and complete that that fundamental humanity would likely have become a casualty.
A flash of inspiration struck one day, creating a void within the void. An empty space in the ‘distance', defined by creating a horizon line that separated arbitrary sections of non-existence for its own convenience, became empty in a way that would reveal what lay beneath nothingness. And then it stepped inside, and emerged into the town square of Richardsville at some point around midnight.
The moonlight was blinding, and the sudden explosion of colors and objects and stimulation was like a rush of fire directly into whatever rudimentary optical receptors it had conceived for itself. Had anyone skipped the New Year’s celebration that was being held clear on the other side of the city and decided that they would rather develop a quick prayer to The God’s Mangrove, they would have seen a mysterious, dark lump, rather like a blackhead pimple that had grown to the size of a person, resting on top of the water, bumping against the tree as if it were being pushed along by a current that was impossible for the pool to generate by itself. The entity was frightened, hurt, scared, and desperately longed to return. It saw the door open again, and it returned to the darkness.
This gave the creature a strange sense of masochistic desire. As frequently as it could, which to humanity would have seemed to be every few weeks, it would poke its head outside of the tree to examine the area. A few times, people spotted a strange black mass emerge from the tree in a way that looked like a kind of projection radiating from the tree, and they, of course, panicked. Demons? A curse? Strange magic? All kinds of thoughts rattled their skull as they saw this entity attempt to take in the limited surroundings that it could handle, and they fled. Priests, mages, and scholars consulted the tree during the daytime but could never explain the phenomenon. One priest claimed to have observed the emergence but dismissed it as a harmless magical occurrence; the kind that usually happened when humans met the works of the Gods.
But for as little as they learned about The God’s Mangrove, the entity deep within was learning rapidly. It heard them speak and began to put together language and words and how these vocalizations and sounds allowed for a kind of intellectual reflection of concrete reality. It saw the many colors and shapes of life, and most of all, it saw life itself. Humans. Dogs. Cats. Insects. Other trees. Leaves. All mixing and moving and behaving in ways that it had enough knowledge to recognize were what it wanted for its entire existence. It loved the Humans most of all.
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Gradually, as it sat inside of the tree, acclimating to this new stimulation, it began to fashion itself into a human. Because the vast majority of its visitors were women, usually priestesses and mages who appreciated how the tree offered an escape from the many stresses of the local University, it began to fashion itself into a woman. It constructed a kind of ‘peephole’ that would have required immense magical talent to locate even if one knew that it was there and where to look for it, which allowed it to stare at the outside world without the outside world staring back. Human as it was, it knew fear, as irrational as it was.
Its favorite was a redheaded woman with vibrant green eyes who would pray before it every evening for an extended period of time. It knew enough human language at this time to recognize that she was praying for her father, who was sick, and her success, as she wished to become a Battlemage. Something about this woman excited the entity. The depths of her language, of her hopes and dreams, and an unexplainable aesthetic preference for her form all merged together and resulted in the entity finding its inspiration; fashioning its body into an exact copy of her own. It would never know that this woman’s name was Faustina, and she would perish mere years later during one of the first battles of the Battlemage career that she so desperately prayed for. Indeed, she was buried in the graveyard just behind the mangrove that it sometimes watched people walk through, curious as to why they felt such sadness in a place.
The first time it stepped outside in this new body, it made sure that it was when no one was around. This was long after Faustina passed away, and long after anybody who would’ve recognized her was gone, so there was no risk of being recognized as an imposter, nor did the tree’s entity hold any particular concern for the absurdity of the situation. It instead feared Humans because it had no idea how they would respond to it, and it recognized that this was the beginning of a dangerous response in Humans. So it emerged, and it felt on human skin the soft, cold stone of the Richardsville town center beneath its feet. Had anyone been there, they would’ve seen a woman with flowing red hair and deep green eyes, clad in a long, thick black cloak, step out of the tree as if it were a door, take a few steps forward, and then vanish. But for the entity inside of the tree, it was the most magical moment of its life so far.
Now imbued with a human form and a connection to humanity, they began to think more human thoughts. No longer was it fear and regret and curiosity, but some kind of joy. It enjoyed seeing children play in the plaza, recognizing the smiles on their faces as one of the miracles of this strange life it had been given. It felt pity when people prayed for their problems beneath the tree, and it received a rudimentary education in the many things to know about the world by listening closely and cross-referencing the stories that it heard with each other, particularly the problems of the world. And most of all, it felt happy as the sun set and it slept, recognizing sleep as a way to pass the time between the boring parts of life.
But they gradually wanted more. The entity inside of the tree found themselves wanting to help people, wanting to do more than listen and wait and explore when it was safe. So many people who came to them to pray were soldiers, warriors, adventurers, students, or common people with lofty ambitions or simple needs, and stories to tell before and after they arrived to The God’s Mangrove. And the entity within the mangrove not only wanted to help them, they wanted their own story. The final straw for them came when a young woman came at midnight, interrupting one of their attempts to leave with her story.
She kneeled down in front of the pond and bowed her head so low that she could rest her forehead against the stone, and she wept. They often did this. Some people came here to cry in a place where no one could see them and no one could judge them, and when they finished they wiped themselves up and returned to their duties. She cried longer than most before she spoke.
“Adonai, why did you take my children?” she eventually managed to choke out, her words coming shakily and with great pain. “May I not have a moment as a mother before they pass? I have worked for so long and offered so much, and yet I can not have even this? Help me please to understand.”
The entity within the tree knew very little of the bond between parent and child, other than the fact that it mattered very much to both parties. How many times had it seen children weeping over what it assumed to be their parents in that graveyard, and parents weeping over their lost children, sometimes at the same time and separated only by a few dirt plots? And who was this Adonai, that saw itself fit to cause such suffering to these lovely people? For the first time, they felt righteous anger. They had heard words like punish and avenge and murder, usually in the depths of the most venomous prayers that people had, which were usually an emotional release of their worst emotions before they picked themselves up and continued with their day, and the entity could only think about how such anger deserved to be directed towards this Adonai. Child killer that it seemed to be, and severe crime that also seemed to be, presented a logical problem to the entity as to why no one else had considered killing this God.
The woman left, and when she did, the entity reemerged. It followed her at a distance, the mother’s grief preventing her from noticing the strange, cloak-clad figure following her. They left town, and the entity was careful not to let itself be overwhelmed by new buildings and new places and new thoughts and new feelings. It has a job to do. They rounded about to the graveyard, and the Entity couldn't help but stare at The God’s Mangrove, momentarily stunned by the surreal realization that, once more, it was staring upon itself: one soul gazing upon its second body. When it looked back the woman was getting up and leaving. Soon after she left the entity looked at the grave that the mother had visited. The name was Emily Bach. Next to her was a Johannes Bach, and next to him was a Geoffrey Bayern.
The entity realized that it had no name. What was it? It was The God’s Mangrove, that was what humans had called it, but looking back at the tree brought it to the understanding that The God’s Mangrove was simply another body, and a name should reflect what it in of itself was, not the tree. So it decided on Emily Bayern. And then they returned to the tree to rest.