Rooted in Power: Book 1 in the Ladies of the Elements Series

🍭A. R. Whitaker🍭 1 story

Story Notes

Summary

When the earth chooses you, the world depends on what you do next. Celeste Vann is a twenty-six-year-old botanist in Portland, Oregon — quiet life, thirty-seven houseplants, and a grief she's been carrying since her mother died. Then one October night she falls asleep with her hands in the soil, and something four billion years old wakes up inside her. The Worldroot: a vast living intelligence buried beneath every city, every forest, every ocean on Earth. It has been building toward consciousness since before the first cell divided. It has been waiting for someone who could carry it. Now it has found her. But Celeste isn't the only one who knows the Worldroot exists. A powerful organization called Syndex Biological Sciences has spent three years seeding the planet with extraction nodes, preparing for an event they call the Harvest — a synchronized global drain that would shatter the network forever and leave the Earth a silent, lifeless shell. At its center: the brilliant and coldly calculating Dr. Elliot Crane, and his most dangerous operative, a man who was once connected to the Worldroot himself, and who turned that connection into something terrible. Celeste has four months, a handful of extraordinary allies, and abilities she is still learning to control. The fate of the living planet is not a metaphor. It is literal, urgent, and entirely in her hands. Rooted in Power is a superhero epic about the oldest force on Earth and the young woman chosen to defend it — a story of grief and growth, power and restraint, and what it truly means to belong to something larger than yourself.