The Rootbound

I was not meant to go past the threshold, but the vent air alone was enough to unmake my nerve for description, so I went in anyway. The throne was intact. He was not or not entirely. What is left of him has grown into the chair itself, root run through the armrest, bark closing slow over where a ribcage should be, a whole quiet architecture of wood standing in for a spine. The vault carries green resin first, thick and cold, like sap sealed inside stone long before anyone thought to open it. Beneath that, moss, holding the floor's memory, damp and patient, the smell of a place that has not been walked in a very long time. Deeper still, past both of those, something warmer moves cedar, or bone, I could not tell you which, and after a while I stopped trying to separate them. Nothing in that room had decayed the way it should have. It had only slowed. I wrote my notes outside the vault, not in it. I am not ashamed to say why.


Preservation - vault sealed at point of discovery; subject was not extracted, and is now considered part of the structure.
Provenance - recovered beneath the collapsed east hall of the First Kingdom ruins, three levels below the mapped floor.
Cross-File - none on record. The growth pattern does not match any known archive precedent.
Archivist's Note - we stopped calling it a body around the second week. Not sure what to call it now.