He dreamed - and in his dream it was beautiful. It was so real, so clear and so close that he could swear that he could touch it. That if he just reached out, he would find familiar warmth under his fingertips, sweet scents of confections and savory scents of the meat pies steaming on stalls. It was so… real; it was then, the last pure gathering of his people.

It was festival, the peak of the season of wishes, the time of year alone meant more families were wishing for children, and more likely to be successful. But also, it was the longest day of the year; the leaves were shifting color, the weather was cooling, and people gathered to sing and dance for the shifting of the year. Wild spinning dances, ringing with bells, Prayer ropes tied freshly around the trunks of the trees to bless the people as a whole.

Booths lined the street, and families and their existing children swarmed the streets, laughing with the raw bubbling energy of youth, their small branches tied with colorful ribbons in a celebration of the embroidered ribbons that families were tying to the larger branches of the great trees.
Small celebrations and reminders of where they had come from.

The embroidered ribbons of prayer were tied to the branches, happy and hopeful people each praying that their wish would bear literal fruit. The nourishment for the child they prayed for. Well wishes echoed through the crowds that gathered among the more popular trees at the groves in the city center. May their branches be bright and their fruit be sweet. It was such a joyful time, especially today, the longest day of the year, when the sky was at its clearest and the clouds held prism edges when they dared paint the sky with their presence. Music swelled as festival-goers shared sweets and confections and wished the newly wed well.

He walked and touched each new ribbon, willing it to bear the sweet fruits as he was meant to do; he wasn’t sure that his ‘blessings’ really did anything; in fact, he’d later be sure that they did nothing at all once the trouble began.

Who would have thought that the first desperate person to steal the fruit of another would cause such a landslide of calamity? One person became two, two became 4, became 5, became 7, became so much more. Had it all truly started from such a simple and desperate action?
Snapped-off branches grew sick where fruit had been stolen.

The couples who ate, and the children who ate from the stolen fruit, grew sick and died, and that sickness spread over time; more and more couples lost their children and then became sick themselves. It was so strange to watch a world that you had lived in your whole life fall to pieces around you, bit by bit, leaf by leaf, branch by branch - till all that remained were the skeletons of a once beautiful world and society.


—-


He lay on the ground in the ruins of the once great city, at the roots of the only tree that remained, as far as he could tell, in the whole of this once great world. Even it seemed sick, dying, the branches drooping and the leaves barely clinging to the ends of the branches where it sought out the too-bright sunlight and burned from its intensity.

He reached up and gingerly snapped off a low-hanging twig; it cracked, brittle and dry between his fingers, and he mourned it as much as he had mourned the last of his people dying, withering away. Mourned the loss of their songs and their voices, their stories and the culture that they had written on animal skins that now grew dry and brittle in the libraries.

Even the crops had died, though he’d done his best to tend them as long as he could; it seemed that the rot had a hunger and drained the soil till there was nothing left anywhere to sustain the once lush greenery that had graced the world. The great trees that had survived thousands of generations were now gnarled and twisted trunks that reached skeletal fingers up to scratch at the sky with a dry frustration at their fate.

The cities, the buildings, had been crumbling for who knew how long now; the thick clay and glass that had once framed beautiful sprawling homes, covered in moss and grasses, even built up around tree trunks, were gone, falling in and over on themselves like they were drunk on the deadness of the world.

He curled his fingers into the dry soil for the perhaps hundredth time, so chalky and dry it was like ash, almost silky in his fingers around the pebbles that he could half swear were becoming brittle themselves. He had thought for so long that he’d die with his planet. He just wanted to know what he’d done wrong.

So many generations before him had performed the ceremonies, overseeing the festivals, and it had always gone well. But something had changed and, once it changed, it seemed like a landslide, like when the rains fell so hard that even the trees couldn’t hold hillsides together. Devastating, familiar… a terrible parallel to the behavior of the people once they started stealing the fruits from each other. The desperation they must have felt, the want and the longing.

Gone now, sifting like the soil through his fingers as he gazed skyward and mapped out the constellations and wondered if anything out there remained.

How long had it been since he had felt anything but despair, to see his world dying like its people, to find himself alone and afraid of a future he had no way of understanding.
Perhaps that was why when he felt the first tug, he hesitated; he couldn’t believe that there might be more, because how long had it been?
How long since he even hoped that there might be people and voices? A shudder ran through him, and he reached back for the tugging sensation, letting it pull against him.
It pulled him forward, away from the desolation of his world and into a great unknown.





1037 word count.