Three things, once buried, should remain so: Sleeping wizards, sleeping kings, and nuclear waste.
Problem is, I had a hard time deciding which of these directions to take. I wound up trying to go all three directions at once, which resulted in something of a mess. Writing fiction is about infinite choice, yes, but not infinite choices: you can have anything, but you can't have it all. Not all at once, anyway. You certainly can't put it all in a single story, I can tell you that much.
The story's founding image, a lone tree on a patch of grass surrounded by and protected from an urban construction project, was something I saw in downtown Boulder last month. Some sort of drastic renovation activity was being perpetrated near the library along the Canyon Street parking lot, and that one tree appeared intended to survive the bulldozers. The destruction around it was so complete, I couldn't even imagine the park as it used to be, so I couldn't see the tree as all that was left. Much easier to visualize some careless giant having picked up a piece of some other park, as a child might pick up a rock, and dropped it on top of a mud field when they got tired of carrying it around.
Cover art incorporates several public domain images. That tree may or may not be a pine. Its roots are pretty epic, though.
