The Tree of Life
“The Tree dreams, and the priests read the dreams.”
Aurelia's faith, centered on the three-hundred-meter Tree of Life with a heartbeat. The priesthood interprets the dreams it sends to those who sleep beneath the canopy.
At the center of Aurelia stands the Tree of Life — three hundred meters of trunk, a canopy you can see from the ocean, and a heartbeat that has pulsed light every six seconds for ten thousand years.
The Aurelian priesthood interprets the Tree's dreams: visions that come to those who sleep beneath the canopy, symbolic, unsettling, and consistently accurate. Nations have quietly steered policy on a single Aurelian dream.
The priests do not announce the newest truth: three years ago, the dreams stopped. The Tree is alive, the roots still move — but whatever lives at its center has gone silent, like a watcher who turned to look at something else.