The Tale of the Rumbling Roots (Maokai Fan Story)
accidently posted this in the wrong board, here we go
This story isn't canon with Maokai's lore, nor is it official in any way whatsoever.
I wrote this in iLuma's synopsis contest, but decided to make a post of it's own because it is not a story that belongs in that post.
If you like it, thank you for reading.
The Tale of the Rumbling Roots
There is a curious story about a orange orchard owner who owned acres of land, all dedicated to his booming fruit business. However near his estate was a gnarled tree of unknown specimen. It was said that the tree was planted there as a beautiful sapling by the orchard owner's grandfather, long before the Great War had swept over their nation leaving nothing but destruction and death in it's path.
The grandfather had perished in the war, not from fighting but from suicide after seeing the family orchard being pillaged. He had locked his son in a bunker, who emerged many years later to see nature take it's course, and thousands of young trees taking the place of their fallen ancestors. He then had discovered a horrible sight; his father had hung himself on the beautiful tree that he planted as a child. He had cut his father's decaying corpse down and layed him to rest next to the tree, to serve as a living gravestone for the man.
However as the years past, the leaves of the tree had fallen, never to grow back, and the bark had turned from a vibrant brown into a darkened purple that had a toxic look to it. The tree was seen by many specialists who did not know how to treat it, as they did not know even where the tree could have originated from.
Appearing as if it were just clinging to life, the tree had shortened in stature and gnarled into a hideous shape. The wife of the orchard owner was insisting that he remove it, as it was lowering the value of the property, and had started to emit a pungent stench. However he remained vigilant and refused, as it was the gravestone to his grandfather.
One day, she had enough. Late in the depths of night while the owner was innocently sleeping, she had brought bags of salt and rat poison to the base of the tree, intending to secretly poison it's roots and end it's existance once and for all. . . . When the owner woke the next day, it was not next to his beloved wife. He called and searched for her throughout the house, and when he determined she had to be outside, he was witness to the most horrible thing that he had ever seen.
Her severed, bloodied head, stuck on a branch lodged in the dirt of where his grandfather's tree should have been. The tree had disappeared, leaving no trace of where it could have gone.
Death was not the ending of this story however. The owner's orchards had produced the most beautiful fruits that anyone in the country had even seen, larger than a cantaloupe and more numerous than the leaves on the trees. During the profitable harvest however, the owner had made a curious discovery; upon each of the trees in his orchard was a single purple gnarl, at the base.
-SquishyTentacles
