TOL ~ 4/7

Maine finally found the answer to the question as he was pondering the only celestial body above Eather. He had always considered the sky to be just a simple place where air elementals roamed freely, but… with all of his previous goals attained, his thoughts became consumed by a singular desire: escaping this world, and finding more.

What that ‘more’ was, the Tree of Life did not know for certain. More elementals? Intelligent entities to learn and share knowledge with? Ways to propagate further? Whatever it was, he would find the answer in time. 

<There's nothing out there, Maine.> Parting informed him gently, not wanting to destroy his dreams, but instead simply attempting to explain from her personal experience. <Duality exists between the heavens and the earth for a reason. Here there is matter, life, and change. Outside of the bounds of our sky, there are no celestial bodies beyond the star. Out there is merely void, and stagnation.>

{Only for now, Parting.} Maine cheerfully told her as he rustled his leaves in excitement. {Soon, life will be out there as well. Who knows what could change after that?}

<The void is unending, Maine.> Parting's warning was shrugged off, soon forgotten as Life’s preparations moved forward. She never brought it up again, nor did she work against him, which was all that mattered. 

His first attempt to breach the atmosphere and expand beyond Eather was one of straightforward directness. One of his trees grew at the highest point of the tallest mountain. From there, he began weaving roots together. Once he had miles upon miles of the thin woven strands, he coaxed wind and air elementals into a fervent dance, working with Motion to conjure a maelstrom; lifting the weave toward the heavens through sheer force.

Yet, the higher the roots went, the weaker the elementals became. They were bound to their concept, and as they reached the heights, some of them directly dissipated, while the others simply fell back toward the planet. Maine felt the exact moment when their embrace loosened, and his roots slowly fell back toward the ground far below. {I feel like we were close… if being lifted by the air is not the correct answer, perhaps something more solid?}

His friends, having no real ambitions of their own beyond living according to their nature, gladly helped him pile hundreds of thousands of tons of stone and dirt on top of the mountain. Various elementals ensured it stayed together, others followed the sisyphean orders and simply continued rolling stones higher and higher up the mountain. Eventually, the earth and stone elementals passed the point where air elementals could freely roam, penetrating into the void.

It was a great success, one they celebrated for months. 

Everything after that was more difficult. No matter what combination he tried, he couldn't get his trees to grow on top of the peak. His friends came together, with Durability being the one who found an answer. |Perhaps you require more than simply light and soil. What if, instead of trying to stand alone, you created a bubble of metal and glass atop the peak, which we could fill with combinations of the elements until your tree can survive?|

So that's exactly what they did, growing a terrarium outside of the planet over the course of only a few days. His sapling took root, and life began to grow outside the bounds of the planet. Unfortunately, frustratingly, expanding outward seemed utterly pointless. There was nowhere to go, beyond the single star, which Duality cautioned would not be a survivable experience. There was another simple fact, which Maine thought about as the years passed and attempt after attempt failed.

{I am not truly out there myself. Even my sprouts in the void are surrounded on all sides by remnants of Eather… but life cannot exist in a void.}

As the decades drifted past, his friends put less and less effort into his new ideas, content as they were to continue as they always had. Maine, on the other hand, never stopped trying, but deep inside himself he understood that unless something changed… he would never be able to succeed at his task.

Millennia after his initial blooming of sapience, something finally did change: 

The Tree of Life had a limb *crack* under the weight of a simple passing wind.

Immediately, all of his attention was back on his tree, his one true body. For the first time, Maine realized he had grown vastly ancient. His bark was petrified, he had lost many of his leaves, and the ground for miles and miles around him had long since become desiccated, stripped of all nutrients and water. “I’m… old?”

In a panic, he searched through his root system for the elementals necessary for revitalizing the land around him, reaching out and grasping them to pull them forcefully to his domain. Every elemental on Eather knew his touch at this point, but for the first time, he wasn't willing to wait patiently for them to get around to the task he needed.

Revitalizing such a large area would not be an easy task for something lesser, so he was pulling on an entire island at once. It resisted him, content to remain where it was. For the first time in what had been centuries, Maine experienced a brand new concept: fury. 

Born as it was of fear, that fury translated into the now ancient, powerful Eidolon squeezing the island and putting his entire force of will into making the island do what he wanted. To his shock, the island didn't do what he demanded, nor did it move. Instead, his roots reached into something deeper within the elemental, draining the entire chunk of land far off the coast of life.

Maine gasped in horror as he saw the island shift into a gray coloration, dead in an instant as all of its constituent useful parts were drawn in by his roots. The feeling of self-disgust lasted only until the wave of vitality reached his tree. Immediately, his mind cleared of the cobwebs which had grown over the ages, and he could think with the same agility as he had dozens of centuries ago. “I… hadn’t even realized how far I'd deteriorated.” 

In an effort to hide his deeds, he crushed the now-dead island and sank it beneath the waves. Then he turned his focus inward again, noting with joy as fresh buds appeared on his branches, rapidly turning into vibrant leaves the likes of which he hadn't worn since his youth. 

As he looked out at the world again, his mind was full of new, darker concepts. 

“Do we really need all the unintelligent elementals?”