tree stories (a)

I want to create a world. nothing huge, at least not right off the bat. start somewhere small, like a town or a village or a hamlet. A place called stoneridge falls or something. Is it a modern place? no. how much technology are we talking about here? Not sure yet. Pre-industrial to be sure. I want forests. Huge, towering trees covered in moss and vines, countless leaves creating a canopy that filters everything in pale green light. A tiny village dropped in the middle of a vast, beautiful forest. what appears to all it's inhabitants to be the only civilization for weeks in any direction. Mostly autonomous. Livings made harvesting minimal amounts of the forest surrounding them. Why only minimal? It would be nice if people were wise enough to be careful about available resources, but it isn't plausible at all. Something must be keeping the village a certain size, keep them from venturing too far from it's borders. Warring tribes of savages? No, they too would harvest the fuck out of the forests. Low population rate perhaps. But again, why? a combination of factors. It was decimated, far in the past, not by any one cataclysmic event, merely the old world's natural course. Resources dried up, population grew, eventually one problem was fixed by the other. But something happened. As the human race was reduced by famine and drought to a fraction of it's original size, nature returned bit by bit as well. Over the course of hundreds of years nature was alive and well, with her one enemy beaten senseless. How though? Man did such a fantastic job of mining the planet to a husk, what if anything was left to start over. And that's the rub. Nothing was left. The planet was a massive barren wasteland one year, and the next it was not. But you can't make something out of nothing.

You can't make something out of nothing. For generations this was the unofficial slogan of our village. Toothless old men, safe and secure in their forefathers' tradition of entropy, had long since settled in for the end of all things when it happened. All of our history, be it spoken or scripted or sung, was of deserts and their unrestricted growth. Of trees and their place in myth and myth alone. Of death and decay. Ours was not a species meant to survive, everyone had said. Old books were survival guides to the apocalypse printed in vast quantities. Church officials and street preachers alike were smitten with glee that all their howling had borne bitter fruit at last. The great cities had gone dark, the shanty towns erected in their stead were well-prepared for the slow rot of starvation. The people were ready to tough it out, regardless of whether any food was to be found anywhere ever again. Unfortunately, some men came to the conclusion that the fewer who were left, the more food that would remain for the survivors. war is an inevitable part of the history of man, but no battle is bloodier than the one fought to eat. what had been a slow decay erupted into a ruthlessly efficient formula of attrition. Immaculately maintained communication and data storage systems, powered on batteries that were one of the civilized age's last contributions to man, gave a horrifically accurate tally of the food remaining on the entire planet. Wise men under savage whip and chain were forced to conclude that a very small population indeed was required to survive on the remaining stores for longer than a decade. The results were unfathomable. The global population, already reduced by a third due to widespread famine, was mercilessly ground down to three percent of the number obtained during the final census some thirty years prior. And so we came to the twilight of our time as a species. What had once been an air of grim determination was now simply grim. The remaining shreds and tatters of the old world began to truly break down due to a lack of interest and ability to maintain them, and we began to wait.

And then there were trees. Massive, towering trees growing in all corners of the globe, far from man's desperate reach. Trees so tall as to touch the clouds themselves. There had been no indication that anything would ever grow again, yet in the span of one year there were trees.

I'm dreaming of a desert I've never seen before, night skies stretching endless over cracked and broken earth. The clouds are missing in one spot, like the oversized eye of a storm. Everything is perfect stillness, anticipation holds me pinned in place. A single crack appears in the ground in front of me. The seconds rush by, like time has something to make up for. The crack becomes a chasm, green light crawling out a hole too big to measure with the eyes. The wind has introduced itself as a major player, three directions at once and blowing to break me in half. The hole in the clouds is mirroring the glow of the ground. Every hair is standing on end, every light is this light, green and getting greener. As the next moment passes a lightning bolt strikes, the light meets itself in a flash that almost takes my sight. The thunder that follows blots out my senses. I begin to freefall, tumbling towards a light i don't see but feel. I open my eyes and see just for a second this tree,