The world had turned to dust.
Eli stumbled through the cracked remains of what was once a forest, his boots kicking up clouds of fine, dead earth. The air tasted like metal and decay. He adjusted the straps of his pack—lighter now, after weeks of walking. Inside, wrapped in cloth like a sacred relic, was the last acorn from the Old World.
They had told him it was pointless. "Nothing grows anymore," the elders said. "The soil is poison." But Eli remembered his grandmother’s stories—of trees so tall they scratched the sky, of roots that wove the earth together like threads in a tapestry. He remembered green.
At the center of the wasteland, he found it: a single patch of exposed ground, darker than the rest. Kneeling, he dug with his hands until his nails split. The earth here was still damp beneath the surface. Still alive.
He pressed the acorn into the hole and whispered the words his grandmother had taught him—words no one had spoken in decades. Then he sat back, his throat tight.
Days passed. Eli rationed his last drops of water, his lips cracking under the sun. Just as his hope began to fray, he saw it—a thread of green, fragile as a breath, pushing through the dirt.
The earth remembered. And so would he.
