The language of the leaves

In the ruins of our century, the forests began to write again. Their script was neither ink nor binary, but a weaving of signals through sap and spore, a pulse passed along the long memory of roots. Some called it an “organic internet.” Others, more superstitious, dismissed it as forest-lore — but they did so out of fear, for to name it was to summon it.

The first to read it were the savants — sleepless men and women with dirt under their fingernails and fever in their eyes, who dosed themselves on psilocybin until the boundaries of perception thinned. What they saw was not private vision but shared revelation: messages bright as phosphor, instructions writ into the vascular tissue of the earth. They would return from their vigils trembling, carrying blueprints for root-borne networks, spore-voiced devices, luminous threads of communication drawn straight from hallucination into machinery.

And the world, starving for connection, desperate for light after collapse, welcomed it. Children huddled at dusk around pods powered by glowworms. Families whispered across continents through braided root-cables. Lovers left messages in the crowns of willows and retrieved them at dawn, wet with dew.

But beneath the marvel lay the warning, though few dared speak it aloud. The forest was not passive. The forest was not generous. It had accepted our bodies into its circuitry, but not without price. To read too deeply, to splice too far, was to invite a demand that could not be refused.

For the forest spoke not only in light and air, but in hunger. Its messages, once radiant, had begun to darken, shading into command. And in their trances, the savants all reported the same phrase, whispered from bark and mycelium alike:

More flesh

He tried to explain once to his father how the leaves on the ash tree by the fence seemed to change colour when he was sad, how they “spoke back” to him in patterns of green. His father’s silence was worse than anger; he simply walked away, muttering about daydreaming again.

Children laughed and called him Mossbrain, Root-boy, and The Gardener. They never saw how much it hurt. Calhoun grew quieter, carrying his visions inside until even he began to doubt them.

It might have ended there — just another odd boy ground down by mockery — if not for the few who believed in him. There was Marta, who said she felt the oak in the churchyard tremble the day her mother died. There was Hyun, who swore that when he touched his dog’s fur, he could feel the pulse of the grass beneath him. They were not scientists, not yet; just outcasts huddling together, trading secrets they couldn’t share with anyone else.

Fifteen years had passed since Calhoun first began listening to the woods. The three of them had grown into their own professions, but their nights still converged here, in the sagging shed at the edge of the village. It leaned to one side, as though embarrassed to be standing. Constructed of rusted corrugated tin, with beams half-sunk into the damp earth, the air inside was thick with wet compost and moth dust. Yet for Calhoun and the two who still followed him, it was the only laboratory they had.

They had dragged in trays of soil wired with copper filaments, jars of rainwater hooked to gutters, and crude pulse meters scavenged from broken radios. Their tools looked more like children’s toys than instruments of revelation.

It was Calhoun who suggested the mushrooms, not as a party drug, nor as an escape, but as a key to understanding something older than language, known to shepherds and shamans. Fungi threaded through the soil like the nervous system of the Earth.

“We can’t expect them to speak to us on our terms,” he said, arranging the small grey-brown caps in a row. “If plants and fungi already communicate beneath us, then maybe these can open the same channels within us, the ones we sealed shut when we built walls.”

The others exchanged wary glances. They weren’t mystics; Hyun had trained as a mechanic, the Marta as a nurse. But both had seen enough of Calhoun’s strange coincidences to suspend their disbelief.

They measured the dose carefully, enough to alter perception, but not enough to overwhelm, and ate in silence, the bitter taste clinging like soil to their tongues.

At first, they experienced nothing but nausea. Then warmth filled their veins like a light. The shed walls seemed to pulse gently — not moving exactly, but alive in a way they had never noticed before. A hum resonated inside their chests, as if the beams, the trays, and the soil itself were tuning to a single vibration.

“Look,” whispered Marta, pointing at a bean sprout in the soil tray. Its stem quivered, and its leaves curled and unfurled in rhythm. It seemed a trick of the eye, but the mechanic saw it too and swore under his breath.

Calhoun tapped the copper wire: one beat, pause, one beat — a pattern.

The sprout bent fractionally, then curled back as if nodding.

They tried again, slower. Two pulses, a pause. The leaves folded in on themselves, then opened.

“Not random,” Calhoun whispered, his voice trembling. “It’s listening.”

For hours, they stayed in that damp shed, trading pulses with the sprout — half-terrified, half-exultant, unsure if it was hallucination or proof. The visions deepened; the walls seemed to breathe, and the soil glowed faintly with hidden filaments, yet the pattern remained. It was not words, not yet. But it was a response — a plant echoing human rhythm, bridging the gap.

By the time the effects of the mushrooms wore off and their bodies felt wrung out, they knew they had crossed an invisible border. The copper wires, the radios, the spores — none of it mattered as much as the simple fact that, with the right opening, the plants wanted to answer.

Outside, the night was heavy with the smell of rain. They stood in silence, afraid to speak lest their words undo the fragile communion. It felt too small to share with the world, too delicate to prove. Yet inside them, a seed had taken root: if they could hear this much, then what else lay waiting, just beyond the wall of silence?

Calhoun knew that if he spoke about plants “listening,” laughter would destroy what little credibility he had left. Yet, the idea gnawed at him. If a few grams of psilocybin could open three human minds to rhythm, what might happen if an entire community drank from the same current?

The well provided him with his chance. It was the one source every villager used — a deep stone throat drawing water up from the aquifer beneath the forest. Calhoun started small: a handful of ground mushroom caps dissolved at dawn, stirred until they were invisible. A dose so low that no one would suspect anything.

At first, the changes were subtle. People muttered about strange dreams — not nightmares or visions, just vivid experiences. Whole nights were spent in landscapes of roots and rivers, surrounded by trees whispering riddles that no one could quite recall upon waking. Children reported hearing songs in the buzzing of flies. Old men swore the grain in their fields bent toward them as they passed.

By the second month, the coincidences multiplied. Two women, who were unknown to each other, described the same dream of a lattice made of light, pulsing like a heartbeat. A shepherd sensed the same rhythm thrumming through his flock’s hooves. People began to hum without knowing why, their voices unconsciously weaving together into a low drone.

The visitors noticed first. Traders from a neighbouring hamlet came with salt and skins but returned unsettled. They whispered that Calhoun’s village felt wrong: too quiet, too still, with the people moving as though tethered by some invisible thread. “They all look at you the same way,” one trader said, “as if they’ve already shared your thoughts before you’ve spoken them.”

The villagers themselves did not see anything odd. The unity felt natural, like remembering a language they had once spoken as children. The soil rewarded them more than ever before, with crops fattening even in thin ground and fruits glowing faintly with bioluminescence at dusk.

Still, moments of unease surfaced. One girl woke up screaming that the trees were pressing against the walls of her house. Another man swore that the roots beneath the well formed into the shape of a hand. When Calhoun tried to calm them, he felt the same chill in his bones he had experienced in the shed — a sense of something vast leaning close, listening too intently.

But he said nothing. The results were undeniable: the village was thriving. Beneath his caution lay a deeper conviction, one he hardly admitted even to himself: they were only at the beginning. If rhythm could be shared and dreams could align, then the next step was inevitable.

Some night soon, the plants would answer back.

It happened at the well, as if it could have happened nowhere else.

Dusk had settled in a week after the last traders had left, muttering. The villagers gathered in the square as always: children played chase through the fireflies, women shelled beans on their doorsteps, and men drifted in from the fields with dirt under their nails and sweat still shining on their brows. It was an ordinary scene — until it wasn’t.

The moss on the old stone lip of the well began to shine. It was not a trick of torchlight or phosphorescence caught from the air, but a steady glow from within, the green itself waking up. The people stilled. The children stopped running. Even the livestock tethered by the fountain strained at their ropes, ears flicking.

The glow thickened, lines coiling across the moss in shapes that at first looked random, curling like vines. Then the forms sharpened, arranging themselves into letters no one had ever been taught, but that everyone, impossibly, understood.

Not English. Not scripture. Something older. Yet when the words came, they came all at once, flooding through the crowd:

WE ARE CONNECTED.

A collective gasp broke the silence. An old woman dropped her beans and pressed her hands to her chest. Two children clutched each other and began to sob. A farmer fell to his knees, muttering a prayer, though his lips echoed the same phrase he had just heard in his mind.

For it was not sound. The message had not passed through ears, but through nerves, through marrow. Each villager swore afterwards that the words had bloomed inside them, like spores opening. No one needed to translate. No one could mishear.

We are connected.

The moss dimmed, the well returned to its ordinary stone appearance, and the square became quiet again. But the silence was no longer the same. Everyone stared at one another, knowing now that what they had dreamt, what they had half-suspected in whispers, was no longer private.

For the first time in the valley’s history, every mind had touched the same vision. Not Calhoun’s odd mutterings. Not Marta’s fragile confessions or Hyun’s half-believed dreams. But everyone — farmers, widows, children, sceptics — bound in a single revelation.

The square erupted. Some wept, some laughed, some fled. But all carried the same phrase repeating in their minds like a new heartbeat:

We are connected. We are connected. We are connected.

And Calhoun, standing by the well with his hands still damp, said nothing. He only closed his eyes and listened as the chorus swelled.

A century and a half had passed since Calhoun’s last breath rattled in his chest, yet his presence had never faded. His body had been surrendered to the root cells beneath the chapel floor, where the vines wove him into their lattice. Now, when villagers pressed their palms against the moss-covered walls or let the mycelial threads lace their skin, they could still feel his pulse.

Since “The Collapse,” in the groves, no one counted time in the same way anymore. Years were marked by bloom and dieback, reflecting the slow pulse of the phytoweb’s flowering nodes. Children spoke root-words before they learned to write, and the mantra “never again” — once a rallying cry against the old world’s blackouts and grid fires — had thinned to a husk, muttered only by the very old as a charm against storms.

Calhoun was one of the last who remembered what those words meant. He recalled satellites, glass screens, and dead cables writhing with rats. He remembered the first orchard lit up under his hands, with the moss-screens whispering, “feed us.” And he remembered the faces of those who did not survive the trances. Sometimes he wondered if he had ever been one of them — if he had died in the soil long ago and been rewoven into this body of roots and nerves.

The villagers who brought him offerings — spore-bread, cuttings, hair — called him the Root-Seer. Ritual had grown around him like ivy on stone: children were led to him on their naming day, pressing their tiny palms to his and whispering “we are connected” before they could even shape their letters. At harvest, blood from the first slaughtered animal was poured into the root-channel that wound beneath the square, a tithe to the forest that had never stopped hungering.

Hierarchy had settled in, though no one spoke of it plainly. Marta’s line claimed the role of interpreters, while Hyun’s descendants became the guardians of the spring. Other families bristled at this arrangement, muttering that power had been hoarded under the guise of service. Still, when the moss-screens flared to life, it was Marta’s kin who read the glyphs aloud, and none dared to dispute them.

There was ecstasy in it — communal trances where villagers swayed like reeds in unison, their bodies open to the forest’s voice. But fear was never far away. Those who lingered too long in the root-field grew “thin,” their eyes light-struck and their voices fraying into whispers. Children were warned not to dream too deeply, lest the trees claim their tongues. Yet even the warnings were tinged with awe: better to be thinned than to be deaf.

Calhoun’s skin was a lattice of faint green veins; his pupils caught light and held it like mycelium holds dew. But the real change was within. He could feel the informational field all around him, not just as a metaphor but as a palpable geometry, a torus of shimmering currents. Over decades, he had trained himself to move through it the way a bird moves through thermals.

In the age of the grid, neuroscience had taught that memories lived in neural circuitry. But Calhoun had discovered the circuitry to be empty — a navigational device for a far greater field. Savants and hydrocephalic prodigies had always hinted at a deeper truth, their brains like broken compasses still finding true north. The forest had revealed the way: neuromelanin, magnetite, microtubules, glial light — a web of biophotons carrying signals that were not stored but streamed, much like a vanished generation once streamed music from the Cloud.

Now, without his eyes, he could see not just the pain of a cut leaf but the entire informational body of the planet, layered like rings in a trunk. Not empathy. Not telepathy. Something deeper. Sympathy in the old sense — the secret sympathy of things.

He had ventured deeper than anyone else before him. And he had found something waiting.

The moss-screens no longer needed words. In the field, the forest spoke directly: branching glyphs of hunger curling through his mind, symbols older than roots.

FLESH IS THE BRIDGE.

The phrase had never stopped; it had only gone underground, like the old world’s cables. Now, the children of the new world — glowing-eyed, soil-fed, unafraid of the dark — had no memory of the warning.

Calhoun flexed his root fingers; the soil shifted faintly, as if it were breathing. He wondered, not for the first time, if he had built a heaven or a trap.