The wind carried dust, but Elliot could tell the difference now—this wasn't just dirt. It was ash. Light gray, clinging, tasting faintly like burnt paper and rain. A leftover from fires he hadn't seen and lives he hadn't known. He exhaled slowly through his scarf and wiped the edge of his hoe against his boot, then dug back into the stubborn, brittle soil.
"You're soft today," he murmured to the dirt. "Must be in a good mood."
The land didn't answer, of course. Not with words. But the hoe—an old wooden tool reinforced with melted scrap metal—struck less resistance this morning. That was enough.
He straightened and surveyed the tiny garden he was trying to revive: a rough square patch fenced by ruined concrete slabs and tilted rebar. Half of the earth had been turned already, and in the other half, little green shoots trembled as the wind passed overhead. There were barely twenty of them—small, curling things—but they stood upright like they wanted to live. That was more than he could say for most things these days.
Elliot rubbed the back of his glove across his brow and glanced at the sky. Pale gray, overcast with a yellowish tint around the horizon. No birds. No clouds. No sun.
Just Stillfall.
He had stopped hoping for blue skies long ago. The Stillfall had stripped that out of the world like it had stripped so many other things: electricity, cities, language. People. Most of all, it had taken the noise. The world after Stillfall was quiet. Not peace-and-morning-coffee quiet. Graveyard quiet. The kind of quiet that made you count the beat of your own heart just to remember that something was still alive.
But even in that silence, something had survived. Plants. A few. Or maybe not just "plants." He wasn't sure anymore.
The first one had sprouted two weeks ago—barely a finger tall, but its leaves had turned toward him when he passed, not the sunless sky. Another had trembled when he reached for it, until he whispered gently. A third had glowed faintly at night, casting soft blue rings into the dirt like moonlight.
Elliot didn't call it magic. He didn't want to.
He called it change. The world had ended. And then it had… shifted. Into something else.
Something slower.
Something watching.
A low crack behind him froze his breath.
He turned.
The garden was backed by the crumbling wall of what used to be a maintenance shed—now part cabin, part storeroom, part shelter. Something—or someone—had disturbed the lattice of dry branches leaning against it. He lowered his hoe instinctively, listening.
Another rustle.
Then, a thud. A shadow fell out from the broken door and slumped to the ground with a soft grunt.
A person.
Elliot moved carefully, the hoe still lowered but ready. The figure was small—female, maybe seventeen, maybe twenty-three, depending on how well she'd eaten. Pale skin, tangled silver hair streaked with ash, wrapped in a makeshift coat of patchy leather and torn cloth. Her boots were mismatched. Her breathing, shallow.
And her eyes, as she forced them open, were gold.
"Hey," Elliot said, crouching. "You alive?"
She blinked at him. "...smells like mint."
He frowned. "What?"
She reached up weakly, touched a leaf poking out of the planter box beside her head, and smiled. "The wind smelled like mint. So I followed it."
Then she fainted.
Elliot stared at her for a long second.
He'd been alone for almost a year. Completely. Purposefully.
But the wind had changed today. The ash was softer. The soil had shifted. And now, a girl had wandered out of the ruins and collapsed in his garden, mumbling about mint.
"…Guess you're staying for dinner," he muttered, lifting her carefully.
That night, he boiled water, soaked dry root chips in scavenged broth, and lit three glowshrooms in the corner of the cabin. The girl lay bundled under a moth-bitten blanket on the cot, her hands still dirty but her face more relaxed than before.
Elliot sat by the window, watching the wind.
Somewhere beyond the cracked stone and warped metal, the world was still burning. Slowly. Quietly.
But here, inside the fence, the mint had grown again. The roots had held. The leaves had danced, just slightly, when the girl smiled.
Something was changing.
And for the first time in months, Elliot didn't feel like counting his own heartbeat just to prove he existed.