About a millennia ago, a baker from the northern parts of Hilversum lost his wife and young son to the customary activities of the men from the North. He mourned their loss deeply, and upon realizing that he had no employment, family, friends, or nation to return to, he decided to take the advice of one of the holier documents he had heard a recitation of in his lifetime: “Find oneself like a tree in times of tragedy; standing tall and noble; though it may be chopped or burnt.” It just so happened that an illiterate baker from the poorest part of his home nation had happened across the most literalistic possible interpretation of the passage, a particular favorite form of interpretation to the ancient monks who were once messengers to the Gods themselves but would now, in the Age of Reason, be sent to an asylum.

He set out on a journey, carrying only the clothes on his back and subsisting on foraging and the occasional donation of religiously inclined townsfolk who were happy to say that their meager donation contributed to a great spiritual journey. He didn’t know where he was going, only that the place he ended up at would have to be of such great spiritual importance that he could be sure that his actions would not be in vain. After a few years of searching, he found such a place in the swamps of what was then still referred to as Northern Bowary. Finally letting himself rest, the holy man sat by a pond that exhibited unusual clearness for swampwater; so clear that, deep at the bottom, he could still see the skeleton of the dragon whose landing had created such a natural anomaly. There, he began to pray.

It’s easy to lose oneself in prayer during times of great tragedy, even more so when prayer became your way of ensuring that your soul ran farther away from your problems than your body ever could, and so too did he lose himself in his messages to the Gods. He lost himself in that swamp so severely that his hunger, and his exhaustion, and his common stresses could not find him. Despite their best pursuit, exercising all means of tracking and hunting they could have ever fathomed, he was simply too deep and too protected by forces far more ancient than hunger for them to have hurt him. The atmosphere of the swamp and the rigidity to which he held himself, never moving except to breathe and never letting his thoughts sway from his devotion to his Gods, resulted in his death passing so subtly and without obvious impact that a philosopher who found themselves in agreement with the phrase ‘What we observe is the truest reality, and what we derive from observation is the truest knowledge’ would not have had to make any substantial leap to argue that the man had never truly died. Instead, his skin turned a gnarled and rough brown, and his eyes never once opened were they to ever desire to, and the subtlest of breaths left his body, and his prayers became the ornamentation of the resting place of his soul.

Imagine then, with all of the struggles that would have been had to find him, had anyone wished to, how long his body sat undisturbed. Even the insects and microscopic organisms failed to harass his form, being driven away by the temperature. The only life nearby were the mangroves, which only grew larger and wilder as they fought for sunlight, space and better sources of water. The ones nearest to the pond that housed the dragon benefitted from the best water and, as such, grew into the best trees. Through a process that would one day be named viviparity, a seed dropped off of the nearest mangrove and dropped into the water, drifting until it collided with the shore nearest to the mummified holy man. 

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Mangroves are fast-growing trees, and a combination of natural factors and something far greater drew the roots of this tree towards the body of the man. Imagine for a moment that you were the God of Time, imbued with complete control over the flow of things. Having taken an interest in the scene, you decided to have a seat and fast-forward, assuring the other Gods that you will rewind later on with no particular care or recollection of the future and what could happen. You would watch the roots of the mangrove tree over these rapidly passing years wrap around the man’s body, exercising some degree of sentience as they clutch at him without harming him. They wrap around his body, with its preserved hair, skin, nails, and clothes, like a mother would clutch onto her baby in the night. And gradually, the mangrove grows far beyond what a normal mangrove should be able to grow into. It grows so much that its trunk forms a kind of canopy over the water, creating a tombstone for the dragon deep inside, and it begins to assimilate the body into that very same trunk. After around a century, you would be able to see, nestled into the base of the trunk, having been turned around to face west, the browned skin of the holy man was so perfectly matched to the bark of the tree that he almost seemed to have become a unique pattern in the lines between the bark, obvious only to those who knew how to look. You would pause the passage of time as only you could and observe how his closed eyes, those large dark imprints, stared out from inside of the tree as only a man who so thoroughly gave himself over to forces outside of base humanity could stare. The lotus position he sat in perfectly fit into the triangular shape of the base of the tree, with the jutting of his knees and the slight curve of his spine easily being explained by the natural ways in which a growing tree will bulge and swerve in its creation with no obvious reason.

And now, just a hair over a century after he had taken a seat in this swamp in what was now referred to as simply Alamagn, he had become something greater. A supernatural monument to the odd ways that nature and spirits worked, a piece of art in a place where only the Gods could appreciate it, a tree made of a man. And eventually that tree, too, attempted to reproduce. However, its sheer size resulted in it strangling its offspring of resources to facilitate their own growth. Indeed, it ate its young with such reliability that had that man who watched his family be executed by barbarians were to see this process with the scale that this story tells it in, he would have found a morbid metaphor; just as he could not protect his children in life, nor could he protect his children now. 

Then, one day, life found its way to this sad part of the swamp. An explorer, fascinated with what may lay within the swamp, found his way to the tree. He was, of course, deeply impressed with its size and the impression of what he assumed to be some monk from the distant South that the tree had grown around, and he documented the sight as well as he could in his journal. As a keepsake of this event, he took one of these seeds off of this tree and planted it into his pack before he set off to his hometown, confident that his documentation of the tree would result in a profitable story to tell. 

He was right. The book he wrote on his travels, of which a centerpiece was this remarkable tree in the middle of the most inhospitable swamp of Alamagn, was as much of a best-seller as it could have been in those days. It was a particular hit in his hometown, which was quickly renamed Richardsville in honor of its most famous resident. He had never forgotten that seed, and, in fact, quickly collaborated with a few local authorities on matters relating to plants to make sure that this town could have its own version of what he referred to as The Praying Mangrove in the town center. It required building a specialized area in the town square to house the tree, made extra large in anticipation of the tree’s size, and some magical augmentations to the seed to ensure that it was able to grow healthily, but eventually, a sapling of the offspring of The Praying Mangrove emerged in the center of sunny Richardsville, and the baker from Hilversum became a father once more.