The world used to be loud.
Elliot remembered that clearly—how the hum of neon signs and the endless whirr of machines used to drown out your thoughts. It wasn't a particularly nostalgic memory. Just... vivid. The kind that clings to you even when you don't want it to. He remembered the subway brakes, the buzz of cheap electronics, even the background chatter of lives passing by.
Now, even his own breath felt like a scream.
The girl—Lyra—still hadn't woken up properly. She murmured sometimes in her sleep, words too soft to understand, too broken to piece together. Mostly she just lay there, curled like a half-buried seed, hands twitching occasionally like they were searching for something.
Elliot sat nearby, peeling the rough skin off a root vegetable with his knife. The fire crackled quietly beside him. Outside, ash continued to drift down like lazy snow, covering the world in its soft, gray stillness.
Sometimes the plants moved when she sighed.
He didn't imagine it. The mint sprigs on the windowsill tilted their leaves toward her with every shallow breath. A small vine growing under the floorboards had curled up through a crack in the wood and now reached gently toward her pillow. No sun. No wind. Just... intent.
He didn't understand it. But he respected it.
That evening, Elliot took his time in the garden. The soil was improving. Not by much, but enough that he could feel it under his boots. Softer. Warmer. Less hostile.
"Hey," he muttered to the sprouts. "You all felt her too, huh?"
The sprouts shivered. Not in the wind. Not from any breeze. It was a language of their own—a flicker of reaction, a pulse in the stem, a tremor in the roots.
He didn't speak plant. But he was learning to listen.
As he watered the rows, he thought about Stillfall. It had come like a breath held too long, then released all at once. No one really knew what it was. Some called it a chemical weapon gone wrong. Others thought it was the world's immune system reacting to too many human scars. Whatever it was, Stillfall devoured motion, sound, light. Technology collapsed. Soil rebelled. And people—most of them—disappeared.
He hadn't seen another living person in over a year.
And now there was Lyra.
When he returned to the cabin, she was awake.
Barely.
She was sitting up, blinking at the fire like she'd forgotten how flames worked. Her silver hair shimmered in the glow, dusted with ash. The golden eyes that met his were clouded with confusion and something else—sorrow, maybe, or weight.
"You talk to plants," she said.
He blinked. "You were awake?"
Lyra nodded. "They… listen when you do. They like it."
He crouched beside her and handed her a bowl of broth. "You've been out for two days."
She sniffed it, then drank slowly. "The mint called me. Your mint."
"It's just a plant."
Lyra shook her head. "No. Not anymore."
They sat in silence for a while, only the crackling fire between them. Then, as if the world itself had decided to remind them that nothing stayed quiet forever, something moved outside.
Not a plant.
Not a wind.
Something heavy.
Something wrong.
Elliot grabbed his cowl and cangkul. Lyra stood too, wincing but steady. Her gaze had sharpened.
Outside, nothing stirred at first. Then they saw it—something slinking just beyond the garden's reach, a shape too long and too thin, dragging limbs that hissed across the broken earth.
Ashlurker.
A carrion beast born of Stillfall, more shadow than flesh, drawn by warmth, sound, life.
Lyra's voice was barely a whisper: "It doesn't like the garden."
The sprouts at the garden's edge quivered—not in fear, but in defiance.
And Elliot could swear the vine beneath the cabin pulsed like a heartbeat.
Something had begun.
Something in the soil, in their breath, in the quiet spaces where life still dared to whisper.
And for the first time in months, Elliot felt something just beneath the surface of his fear.
Hope.