Roxom had been slumbering for a great long. He had gone to sleep several centuries before, surrounded by his forest kin, the single successfully purple glory tree in his territory, having overtaken his neighboring siblings to reach the patch of sunlight let in from the canopy above. It was a struggle to the death, and he was the sole victor. 

Every tree in the forest has the potential to become a god, constantly fighting with its siblings and relatives for space, for nourishment, throttling them if need be and growing out of their decaying corpses. But he was the only one to achieve godhood by securing the godseed, the meteor fragment that had been buried in the soil, the fossilized mineral remains of some long dead space god fallen from the heavens.

The first thing Roxom noticed upon his groggy awakening was the lack of connection in his roots. The nutrient poor soil forced the forest vegetation to form shallow root systems, interwoven and competing for nutrients. It was a cut throat environment, and those that didn’t secure the necessary nutrition paid the price with their lives. 

Despite the struggle going on beneath the soil, and the competition for the meager sunlight that percolated down from the canopy so high above, they were a communicative group, constantly sending forest gossip via chemical signals through the rhizosphere and the mycelium symbiotes connecting in their roots together. 

The silence was deafening. 

His closest neighbor, a magnificent cecropia tree with its thriving ant colony was missing. Roxom couldn’t feel their roots interwoven, only the decayed tips left behind from the extraction. The soil was filled with the final screams of the dead as they were cut down. 

It wasn’t unusual that a tree would die, or even several if a natural disaster struck, but the sheer echoing silence that surrounded him was enough to leave him shaken to his roots. 

He was used to animal life, the forest had been full of it. Wild pigs rooting around his trunk, rodents skittering about in his undergrowth, various bats and birds resting in his foliage. But the volume of human life surrounding him was beyond anything he had experienced before. Humans milled about around him, talking, laughing, as if this wasn’t a graveyard of everyone he had ever known. 

At first Roxom was bewildered, too shocked to have any other reaction. The world had moved on while he slept, the nearby village exploding into a metropolis the likes of which he couldn’t have imagined. And he was the only one left behind. Why me? He wondered. What had possessed the humans to rip apart his world but leave him behind in the wreckage. It seemed cruel, like he had been intentionally left to appreciate the ruin they had wrought. And why him rather than any other, was he somehow more deserving than the others? Perhaps his claim to godhood had somehow protected him, perhaps in some sort of insidious way it had influenced the humans against hacking him down like the others? If he had woken sooner could he have stopped the destruction? Was there even anything he might have been able to do to protect against the carnage?

After the shock had passed he began to see the benefits. Roxom was a pragmatist, after all. He was unimpeded in his access to sunlight now, the sky was the limit for his branches to grow. The rules of the forest stated that one must take as much as was given, and more, if the opportunity arose. And the humans so generously delivered nutrition to him, piling it on his roots like tribute. It was gratifying, to be worshiped. The humans would come, admire his foliage, the flowering crown that he prized so much. Roxom preened, drawing out their appreciation, reveled in praise of his velvet soft blossoms in deep roses and violets. 

But the isolation got to him, sometimes. The aching hollow feeling of loneliness. So many trees, gone. No longer would he listen to the cecropia complain about the sloth that had made its home among her branches, no longer would he compete with the tabebuia tree for who had the most blooms, the jequitibas would no longer obscure his light with fiendish glee.

It wasn’t until they brought shears, clipping his branches, pruning him, in order to draw out new blooms that he realized it wasn’t worship they were offering, but that in their eyes he was an ornament, something to admire briefly but be forgotten. Inconsequential to their short insignificant lives, he thought with bitterness. The indignation, the impotent rage festered inside him like rot. 

Eventually they brought cuttings in, abominations that had been taken from this body, grown up into trees of their own to be planted near him. Roxom could sense them, somewhat, faded wraiths of consciousness, confused by their disconnection from him. Like echos. Pale imitations to his might. After that he couldn’t bring himself to enjoy the attention, every comment on his beauty only emphasized his confinement as a prized accessory in their gardens. It sickened him.