St. Remedius Medical College: “A Tree Lives (And Dies) In Fort Worth”

The World Tree Is Not What The World Expects

(Who was St. Remedius? And why is a medical college named after him?)

As can be expected due to the vagaries of human knowledge and perception, tree metaphors are best moved to other members of the Kingdom Plantae. The paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that the famed tree of life in evolutionary metaphors was, thanks to mass extinctions, closer to a regularly mowed lawn. Corporate organization trees were often less healthy structures than stripped and mutilated trunks, while the top branches therein were themselves best described as “having less of a family tree than a stump.” Considering that the definition of “tree” itself described an end result rather than an actual relationship (as demonstrated by the classic Cercis canadensis), many of the thaumaturgic and theologic structures referred to as “trees” are much more complex than surmised. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the actual Yggdrasil of Norse myth, in neither the shape nor the form expected of something holding the whole of the universe together.

Walking into the park near Will Rogers Memorial Center in Fort Worth, the brass plate below one of the honey mesquites in the park simply contains a Vuun glyph for “forever,” and most amateurs and dilettantes in the thaumaturgic arts assume that the tree in question is The Tree: the tree that interconnects all planes and poles. That assumption was carefully cultivated, no pun intended, by the Thaumaturgy Department at St. Remedius Medical College, because that was only one tree, and that one tree could be targeted by forces malevolent and destroyed without its greater purpose being revealed. The Tree was correspondingly protected with incredibly powerful talismans, echoes, and weintraubs not to save it, but to distract most forces from the innumerable other honey mesquites in North Texas performing the same task. After all, those honey mesquites didn’t just produce voluminous nectar for honeybees, seeds for syrup and flour, wood for grilling, scrub habitat for innumerable plant and animal species, and roots capable of returning tremendous amounts of nitrogen to the surrounding soil. Honey mesquite roots were famous for going deep, but certain mesquite roots went much, much deeper.

By the time of the College’s disappearance, St. Remedius botanists ascertained that certain honey mesquites worked like sutures, holding together a massive wound or flaw in the universe centered on what was now North Texas. What caused the wound, or why the mesquites were commissioned to seal the breach, was unknown, as was what might happen if something happened to those mesquites, In fact, several theses suggested understanding the phenomenon further in order to use alternatives to keep the wound from reopening or to finish the healing early so stresses or sabotage to the world’s mesquite population didn’t cause the disaster they were intended to deflect.

A couple of the papers suggested that the damage was already too late to abate, and from an unexpected source. The Ashe juniper, a common component of North Texas flora referred to as “mountain cedar,” was once welcomed throughout North Texas, until a mutant variety that produced multiples of the usual amount of pollen every winter escaped containment from a valley off the Brazos River approximately 2000 years ago and followed the plow to spread across the state. The first signs of a problem came with regular allergy suffering in Dallas and Fort Worth every December through February so prominent that the reaction was called “cedar fever,” and later studies confirmed that the mutant preferred areas disturbed by human activity. Worse, the mutant Ashe juniper secretes an armada of herbicides and germination inhibitors from its foliage. Leave the trees alone, and their seeds spread via birds and deer eating the berries, while the adult trees kill off competing plants and prevent competitors’ seeds from sprouting. Remove the trees, either by burning or cutting, and the death of the adult just sets off sprouting of several years’ seeds on the site, allowing the junipers to grow in thicker than before. Combine these facts with the mutant becoming acclimated to growing in vacant lots in cities and also becoming more of a fire risk due to higher levels of flammable oils in its sap, and the mutant junipers would have been enough of a threat to the indigenous mesquite population, as mesquites are particularly sensitive to juniper herbicidal compounds and respond poorly after juniper-instigated brushfires. The St. Remedius teams discovering that the mutant junipers were attuned to ley lines just confirmed that the invasion was deliberate and specifically focused on the mesquite wound.

Not that the St. Remedius Botany Department failed to rise to the occasion. Chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons came to bear against the mutant junipers, with additional thaumaturgic resources to force back the junipers without damaging the surrounding biome. The junipers were resistant to most diseases and fungal infections, repelled most large herbivores, and had no human-related use justifying extinction such as wood, oil, or mulch. The efforts slowed the advance even if it didn’t stop it, and with St. Remedius’s famed disappearance, allergists worldwide fear that the next cedar fever season will be the worst ever recorded. Between the pollen and the mutant’s propensity for drawing off groundwater before other plants can access it, the greater Dallas area was almost evacuated in 2051 due to extended drought. The events that caused the mutant’s extinction, as well as the events involving the world wound and the eventual repair and re-establishment of the honey mesquites, are still to be found within the St. Remedius archives.

Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. Questions, concerns, and disgust over generative AI? Check out Contact, Privacy Policy, and AI Policy. And feel free to visit the St. Remedius Medical College Redbubble shop for all of your Mandatory Parker needs.

Ashe juniper Botany Department honey mesquite St. Remedius World Wound