“You grow. You grow and you grow and you grow. Twisted and strange and refusing to die. You form new shoots where the world cuts you back. You learn to grow around your hollows and let life shelter in it. You push up through cobble and masonry and make it crumble as you reach for the sky. And you ready yourself to do it again when they cut you back.”

He pauses.

“Someday, you might find that you can’t grow back. When that happens, you let yourself rot. You feed the next thing that will grow in spite of them. If you know you have that power, they cannot destroy you in a way that matters.”