Cradle Root Rot by Isla Lader
3400 words, ~17 minutes reading time
Issue 10 (Spring 2026)
The mangrove is a broken cradle. The eggshell has been cracked and its membrane split. I grew legs to crawl to conflict; when I got my bearings, I ran, leaping towards it in the atmosphere above. I should not have returned to the end of my childhood and the birth of my career.
Yet, I still search for my newly dead sisters from the port window; the tilt of this small moon nods towards a familiar sun. Mother was due to make a culling.
The shuttle hovers above thick, salted leaves before docking on asphalt in the limestone outpost of genetic cauldrons. When the ramp lowers and the doors fully open, the only creatures on the swamp water’s surface are a few stray dragonflies.
The familiar stench of brine, placenta, and rotten eggs make my eyes water. I use both membrane and eyelid to blink away the wetness upon my exit.
I do so, in time, before the three lead team nurses rush forward to greet me from the terrestrial obligate dormitories. They throw themselves at my feet as supplicants do before a master.
They make no effort to hide that they've been waiting; their distress message bounced between less than a hundred pilots in operation and nearby. I thought there would be at least another one of us already here.
The nurses jostling at my feet makes my service medals click against one another as I step back; the commotion scares the dragonflies away.
I chose to come here without my entourage--maids, deck swabbers, second officers, lieutenants--for this exact reason. This type of sycophancy isn’t the kind between an underling and a superior; it’s that of a nanny and their charge. It’s frankly embarrassing.
When they call me blessed offspring too many times I quickly say, “Are any of Mother’s limbs here to greet me?”
Mother's primary communication, whether land or space, is through a cast of supernumerary body parts able to sever from her and make the journey to their recipient. It’s similar to how her daughters are born. But unlike us, their flesh is milky, their joints swollen with organ failure. They will often expire upon delivery of their message.
“Our apologies, holy pilot,” the head nurse has blood lining her nostrils and a remaining flicker in her corneas, “your Mother has gone silent after the most recent pilot candidate's selection ritual.”
I then ask, “Where is the candidate currently?”
“She washed ashore unconscious, but when she awoke--” the nurse rubs her nose before continuing, “--she is liable to cause hemorrhaging in any individual without the fortitude to withstand her screams.”
It’s a deft obfuscation--giving me information I already know.
That these servants called to the other daughters--pilots, I correct myself, pilots--for aid, instead of any higher on the chain of command speaks to their own dangerous sentimentality.
“Then I shall see her,” I am both nervous and eager, “I shall see her at once.”
The more cumbersome physical abnormalities are shed in puberty, or slough off as we breach the surface of the mangrove’s waters. Social and diplomatic deficits are part of our education on land. A pilot’s legs and language skills simultaneously come in as the nurses answer her insipid questions and massage her pollywog calves.
By the time the pilot enters service on a cruiser or dreadnought, she is an imperious major officer and her remaining bulbous eyes and semi-aquatic mien seemingly wash over chaise lounges, ornate wallpaper, canopy beds, and advanced artillery weapons.
There is little need by the nurses or upper leadership to teach her how to withstand pain, or more importantly, how to kill; a daughter’s time in the mangrove and with Mother is sufficient an education on both fronts.
During my generation’s cull, when I breached to the surface of the water, there had been over nine hundred dead sisters bobbing alongside me to the top.
They’d choked every inch of the water between and under the looping roots of the mangrove trees and the smell had been just short of apocalyptic. Many of them had choked on the water itself.
I’d had to climb across their pale flesh to get to the dusty limestone beaches.
The part I remember the most from cradle to present: how the sound of Mother’s screams leaves a faint tinnitus in newly formed eardrums, but the blood on the side of the ears and against the nostrils is easily wiped away.
We are told it is like any life cycle that includes a metamorphosis. Tadpole to frog, daughter to pilot.
Mother and the mangrove are the evolutionary forces that demarcate facultative and obligate bipedalism. We falter under the immeasurable pain of placing feet to the ground and under the humiliation of walking. The lesson a pilot takes from all of this is that arrested development in evolution's eyes is an unattractive trait.
Yet so many of my human charges are their most endearing to me before the sight of stars on the deck becomes mundane to them.
The nurses try to explain the pilot candidate’s frills and dorsal spines over her shrieking.
They keep framing this as a good thing, “The Holy Mother has answered the prayers of our inland empire with a modern clutch of daughters who are prepared for the evolving dominion of space faring campaigns.”
Vibrant colors freckle the candidate’s pale flesh, all the while IV bags of saline leak across the floor. Machines surround her in vigil and their noises add to the cacophony. We are an audience barely protected by one-way viewing glass with cracks across the surface growing like ripples on water.
The candidate throws her back against the bed, howling; it is hard to tell if the girl is seizing or suffocating. I have never seen a pilot so unprepared for the skies, almost ready-made to simply be thrown back into the water.
“Can we not dose her?” I ask in exasperation.
Suddenly, everything reminds me of Her. I have been in the air for so long, and the way back home is tangled in roots and rituals that now frightens me despite having created me.
“We lost two nurses delivering her, holy pilot. We have not been able to even feed her.”
My pity for these nurses, the sensation I had on arrival, flickers in and out like a breach in life support systems; nurses are meant to be versed in administering all kinds of calming pills and potions. I’m nearly offended when I’m tasked with a syringe and a cloth heavily soaked with something that makes my nostrils flare. I, for a second, wonder why these trembling creatures around me do not suspect that I will kill the candidate. She is technically a competitor.
Still, I walk through the decontamination hallway before I can reach my sister. It’s like being funneled down a narrow tube where I’m being born again.
My new role of pretending to be a caretaker is odd.
And my new sister sounds just like Mother. She notices me, but does not stop her thrashing. You’d think I was just any other nurse with this lack of response.
I find it funny, supremely ironic, as I hold the cloth over her mouth and momentarily lose my hearing. I’ve had soldiers report that while I’ve induced similar horrors onto enemy combatants, that my own psychic pulsations often have a minor splash back. They always assure me they’re not harmed, though. They say it feels like the consequences of not wearing a swimming cap in the pool and that all they must do is wait. Soon enough--I’ve been promised--the sensation fades and the relief feels like water leaving the ear canal.
My sister stops kicking. She is still something made of the deepest parts of the mangrove, but her human-like traits betray her and give the nurses time to rush in and begin to administer all kinds of chemicals to bring her to a complete rest.
I hear the nurses murmur.
“She’s amphibious, at least,” I interrupt the low simmer of whispers, “if the good nurses of this generation cannot tend to her, I suggest I bring her off planet and into pilot academy, or a military hospital.”
They murmur again. It’s like the sound of rain hitting the surface of the mangrove. Deep, deep, deep, but we still hear its plop, plop, plop.
I am decorated with medals. I can sit at the head of a war room table. I can climb over nine-hundred dead sisters.
I remind myself what I am made of and say, “I can be given answers, or I can give you all martial arraignments.”
The lead nurse, the one with the most dried blood around her nostrils, bows twice before speaking, “Holy pilot, we initially sent distress calls to you and your colleagues not to only avoid bothering upper leadership, but because we are investigating your divine Mother’s silence.”
I laugh at them; my own nurses were good singers and knew how to make me not pull my frocks off in a tantrum, but I don’t imagine them being good at much else, let alone a military cover up.
They look no more ready than fish are to ride bicycles, it’s a phrase used by soldiers when they think I cannot hear them.
The lead nurse says, “We believe that your sister attempted to kill the divine creator of pilots, that your Mother’s silence is borne of a treason within the mangrove, retributive measures from Her could be imminent. We need you to obtain a confession, or at least some sort of explanation before we decide the next measures on how to appease Mother.”
Mother prepares you so well, none should attempt to swim back to Her. And why would you want to? It’s a privilege to get to leave.
The uncomfortable sensation that brought me home returns to shame me as I consider that even if you could go back, that if you had untoward designs, even if your sinuses wouldn’t explode and your vestigial gills could separate the oxygen from the thick slurry of water--
Mother would ensure you were brain dead before you could try anything.
There are stained glass windows aboard my ship. Many of them detail battles of particular significance, festivals, the opening of great docks where even greater ship construction occurs.
Only one set of the arched and abstract colors are meant to abstract and narrate the life cycle of a holy ship pilot.
The first window shows a girl who looks like me climbing onto shore, her tail and much of the gills slough off like sea foam.
She is mermaid-like before she walks naked to a geometric citadel that skips the details of her time with the nurses, and leaps straight into her journey to the inland empire.
My sister in the glass is dressed in the same military uniform I am often in and her halo is dotted with the stars she translates into familiar coordinates: the end--fin.
There are too many missing windows, in my quiet opinion. They don’t even recount one of the three most likely ways for me to expire. I made peace with the fact that it will almost certainly be some form of radiation contaminant, something leaking from my ship’s neural frame and into my lungs, eroding my psychic synapses and snapping my vocal cords.
I often wonder how they would illustrate Mother growing us on Her back.
The earliest memories I have are of half of what would become my bipedal face, fused into a ridge on the back of what I will one day know as Mother.
I scream from hunger and small minnows' eyes burst from their sockets. If I am lucky, they will get caught in the current Mother makes, come my way and deliver themselves to me.
The sister below me will often catch some of what I cannot and will later tell me with her glands and a projection of sensation that feels like iridescent trails in the water that she is always grateful for the relief in the ache of her mouth that comes from chewing what I couldn’t.
We are only allowed autonomy if we can seize it; dislodging yourself from Her was the first trial and failure meant being reabsorbed for nutrients.
My tail was my property, and I absorbed it to make legs. This relationship I had with my tail is how Mother sees the daughters who fail Her.
It should be noted in this life cycle that freedom is not entirely a gift from Mother. You must swim close to the same flesh you desperately fled from. If you dally, She will not wait for you and something else will devour you.
This is meant to be nature in its truest form: brutal and unflinching.
Yet, I started to see the artificiality of Mother’s wildness when I was forced to look upon my fellow pilots.
We are allowed to interact during banquets of sorts. It is there that I performatively play at jealousy over how grand another pilot’s ship and so on. One of my colleagues once compared grown pilots meeting one another to beta fish, our protective nature over our ships being like our side of a vast bowl. I nod my head at these comparisons and pretend that I don’t loathe how much it tastes like salt and womb water and how the necessity of these practices has started to seem less and less critical.
I have tried to find similarities in other creatures; I do not believe a beta fish fears its mother. Some humans seem to sympathize, but then there are others who have escaped this sensation entirely.
No one else has a Mother like I do. So where is the naturalness? The universality of that?
“Sister?” the girl wakes me up from where I’m sitting at her bed, my jacket draped over me like a blanket. I’d convinced the nurses that it would be better if I tried to speak with her alone.
No one else had a Mother like I do, except my sisters and the other pilots.
I make the mistake of trying to comfort her like the soldiers under me comfort one another with a gentle touch. When she gets a hold of me, desperately attempting to subsume me into her being, I have my freehand take out my ceremonial saber and press it to her throat.
In the mangrove, our teeth are not for chewing, simply holding the prey. Her tongue encircles the sword, and the force of her eyes attempts to aid in swallowing. A low keening noise tunnels my vision and my ability to hesitate what I do next.
I use to my advantage her myopic focus on subsuming me. When my elbow meets what little cartilage is in her nose and she withdraws to cough out my weapon in a puddle of mucus and digestive spit. She presses her clawed hand to her face in shock; no one in the mangrove fights like that. I split from her, my skin and uniform partially squelching upon detangling from the hunger. We both pant, too, even if my lungs are better suited to the translation of oxygen than hers.
Dark pupils on her Mother-like face blink.
“I did it.” she says before coughing up water and mucus onto the sheets.
The insanity of the immediate confession bewilders me.
I pretend to have not heard her, “Young daughter, due to the failure of your nurses, I have been called to shepherd you to the next part of your life. My name is Captain Enid--” I watch my words wash over my sister, useless and foamy.
She’s confused because negotiation is only something we all learn after we leave this place. Even my name is something given to me inland.
“Pilot,” I call her that because it doesn’t feel right to call her daughter when she’s out of the mangrove waters, “there are wonderful worlds, things to be seen–leave this place.”
Unsaid: --leave this place with me; I know everything you have seen and more, and can wash it away with the sight of new and better things.
My immediate pity and empathy for her is too big to swallow and hold down.
I try to say more, but her interruption has a dead weight to it that silences me entirely, “Why did you return?”
“It is my obligation--”
“I don’t believe you.”
It is said gently. Somehow, that makes the accusation that much sharper and she’s so much more eloquent than I was at this age…
“Then hear this,” I’m scared enough to touch her again, “for the attempt of attacking Mother, for acting against her, to the goal of trying to subsume her and take her role and body for yourself, I place you under arrest. Unless you come willingly that is.”
“I did not just attack Her. I injured Her.”
Daughters and pilots alike lash out when the mention of captivity is even implied. We stare at one another; her eyes are bigger than mine.
Now it is my turn to say, “I don’t believe you.”
She starts to speak to me like I am her little sister, and I hold back the urge to bite her, “Each clutch is more Her than the last. It is because our Mother fears Her keepers inland and above will find something new, build something or bore it better. Too much of Her is in this one and I was hungry. The others are still there, but She’s surely eating our sisters as we speak, trying to heal back what I destroyed.”
She has all the arrogance of Mother, of the best predator who made her way up. I had some of that at the start…
“Before either of us,” I don’t know why I am trying to appeal to sympathy to a being who hasn’t yet been taught how to eat with a fork or what ways you can console the survivors of a failed mission, “Mother used to scream freely, and her screams killed those in the mangrove in masses, and in the cities on the other side of the planet.”
This is another story that I’ve always thought should have been somewhere on the stained-glass windows. Mother is an ally, a provider, She’s been domesticated and that means She feels like vengeance and pettiness.
“You assume too much from Mother’s absence. She’s licking her wounds. I am not destined to become a pilot, or to die a daughter. I will become Mother. I’m going back.”
Why am I no longer like this? Maybe this is not just what it means to be a pilot. This could be what it means to be an elder daughter.
I think I was supposed to keep more of this hubris, but too much was shed when I stepped over their corpses.
I lie to the nurses so that they will give me the ability to roam; I am chivalrous, and I am stern with them, and I pretend to be a predator who is on the cusp of a confession in its quarry.
I step away from the asphalt and into parts of the mangrove that are shallow. I see tadpoles the size of my thumb and tadpoles the size of my forearm on the surface; they worry not what is below them and are more concerned with the sky.
Deep below is dangerous. Still, I remember the bodies dancing in the water, in what little light could travel that far below the surface. I consider the ones I helped feed and that no one but I has that memory.
I consider if appeasement will work, and I wonder how many more years this will continue. I ponder that if She’s injured, then She might have gone further towards the surface to avoid fighting off worse things below.
I squat to the edge of a limestone bank, where the water is shallow for a while and then violently drops off. I don’t think I could do it.
I don’t think I could do it if She weren’t injured.
My medals and jacket clatter around this bipedal form. The water encircles my ankles and only stops being cold when my chest is fully submerged.
Up to my ears and it’s kinder, even sweeter, than bath water.
I imagine either Mother won’t recognize me, or that she will be furious when she sees my silhouette in the murky waters floating above Her.
But I’ve been wrong about Her before. I’ve been wrong about so much before.
