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The Mother Tree has been in Mazalea since the dawn of time, long before Joel stepped a battered leather boot upon the vibrantly colored clay of the terra-cotta land. (That was not so long ago, but time is a slippery thing among the emperors of his world. He’s not ancient like some of them, but sometimes months pass in a heartbeat and minutes last for days.)
The trunk is warm to the touch, the bark rough beneath his calloused hands. He can feel a pulse somewhere deep inside of it - perfectly in tune with his own. There’s a reason it beckons him, singing to his marrow and crawling under his skin. It wants something from him.
It wants his life. Well not his real life of course, but he’s got so many lives to give and…the tree is so very hungry.
He doesn’t realize this until the day he cracks his skull open on a rock - he fell off some scaffolding in the midst of building a house - just a few feet away from the tree.
When he comes around again in bed a few hours later his head hurts something awful. Typically when you die your wounds are meant to heal completely before you wake. That can take anywhere from minutes (for something like drowning) to a whole day (head injuries). But he can feel blood on the side of his head, a thin trickle rather than the scarlet waterfall it was before, but still. He’s never bled like this before.
There’s a crack in the trunk of the tree. Like it got hit by lightening, or exploded from the inside. He hadn’t realized it was hollow, but now he could see it was full of purple crystal. Amethyst, similar in appearance to Gem’s amethysts but still different in some minuscule way he can’t quite place.
There’s a man with his face sitting amongst the shimmering purple blocks.
That isn’t quite true, he supposes as he examines his clone (?) more throughly. They do have the same face, right down the thin cut alone Joel’s temple, but this man wears it differently. (Is he a man? Or is he a shell?)
Joel extends a hand.
/—-/
He’s the first clone to show up, but he isn’t the last, not by a mile. Every time he dies within a fifty block radius of The Mother Tree, another one appears and Joel wakes up a little more tired then he was before.
None of them speak. None of them even breathe. They just do what he tells them to do with a jerky movements and a vacant stare. (They don’t blink, not even if you throw dust in their eyes.) Even for someone as devilishly handsome as he is it’s almost sickening to be surrounded by pale imitations of himself.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the whole situation is that the clones reflect the way he died when each one was created. Some have arrows sticking out of their heads. Some are covered in burns. One of them even has frostbite coating his (it’s?) skin from the time Joel got trapped in an avalanche. That had been slow and agonizing. He doesn’t like seeing it permanently etched into someone.
He wonders if the clones feel his pain as they form.
He wonders if he’s made of terra-cotta like they are.
It’s getting hard to tell where they end
And he begins.