“Do you know why the flowers never bloom?” Karis poked at the green bud and looked up at Gren.

“Not really,” he replied, watching the flower sways back and forth. “It’s like everyone tries to avoid talking about it. Seems like they just stopped one day.”

She pulled at the stem, bringing the bud closer towards her. She took a faint sniff at it, before inspecting the flecks of pink painted across its tip.

“Why?” he asked cautiously. “Do you?”

“Of course.” She stood up and brushed some imagined dirt from her clothes, which were immaculately clean as always. She looked around her for a few moments until another bud caught her eye. With a smile, she casually trotted over towards it.

Eyebrow raised, Gren followed after her. It had started to snow lightly while they talked, wetting Gren’s hair and skin as they stood unsheltered in the middle of the clearing. Yet the girl, wearing a dress undoubtedly unsuited to the weather, did not so much as shiver.

“Care to elaborate?”

Without acknowledging him, she knelt before the new bud. It was hanging limply, its stem broken. Gently, she reached out with her left hand and used the nail of her thumb against her index finger to prune it. She brought the bud up to her face, watching it closely. For a moment or so, it retained its form and colour, but within a blink, the vibrant red petals turned a dark crimson and sagged under their own weight. Another blink, and the whole thing crumbled into a crisp, brown dust of dead plant matter that fell straight to the ground, no wind to blow it elsewhere.

Gren was shocked by the sudden punch of nausea he felt at the sight, and unconsciously took a step back as Karis turned to face him with a smile.

❀

Gadry’s breathing was dangerously heavy as he reached the crest of the hill. He was an active man for most of his life, but perhaps that was the very thing causing his joints and muscles to be protesting so loudly. After seventy-three years, they likely thought they were owed a good rest.

Kris was waiting for him atop the hill, and had been for fifteen minutes. Standing there with a patient smile on his face, the much younger man was a beacon keeping Gadry on course, with his obsidian skin somehow appearing to glow in the darkness, a phenomenon that Gadry dismissed as a trick of the moonlight, though the moon was little more than a slither in the sky that night. Not that he would have been able to see it behind the clouds in any case. As Gadry approached him, Kris extended a hand to pull him the final few steps, and then helped him over to an outcrop of rocks, his body providing a welcome warmth in the cold of the night. Once Gadry was safely seated upon one of the flatter rocks, Kris turned and pointed towards the bright light on the horizon.

“What is that?”

Gadry stared blankly at his youthful companion. The question could not have been one of sincere curiosity. It would be simply impossible for him not to know. Nevertheless, his patient gaze compelled Gadry to humour him.

“That’s Regua, the capital city.”

Kris pondered the distant city for a few moments. From this distance, only the peaks of the highest skyscrapers could be seen poking over the horizon, silhouetted by a bright halo of light pollution.

“Why do you not live there?”

“Rotten luck, mostly. Anyone could come or go in the old days, I hear, back when it weren’t much bigger’n most other towns. Then it started gettin’ bigger an’ they decided they got no space. Load of crap if you ask me, looking’t how high those towers are. Plenty’ve empty land around ‘em, too. Nowadays, you ain’t got much chance unless you’re actually born there. You can try smuggling yourself in o’ course, but gods help you if you get caught, which you likely will be. And if you aren’t, you’re just an illegal living in their gutters, and I can’t imagine that’s any better than just staying out here, miserable as it is.”

Kris nodded slowly, still staring out towards the horizon. “How do they power it all?”

Gadry paused before responding. Nobody was entirely certain, but they had all heard rumours, especially in recent years. Besides, he could not shake the growing feeling that Kris was not asking these questions to remedy his own ignorance, but to test Gadry’s knowledge. “Well, they’re connected to same power grid as rest’ve us. Hydro, coal, nuclear — the usual. I hear there’s still some wind and solar up in the mountains an’ floating on the seas, but they’ve been all but abandoned, seeing as they probably ain’t producin’ much anymore. But some have started sayin’ they ‘ave their own stuff. That they keep to ‘emselves.”

Hearing these hints of conspiracy, Kris turned back to him, raising an eyebrow expectantly. Gadry cleared his throat.

“People say… Well, people say that they found summin’ deep. Down in the ground. Nobody has any idea what, o’ course. But whatever it is, you just need to look over that horizon to see how much good it’s doing ‘em.”

Kris’s face had grown darker while Gadry gave his answer. “Are there others places like Regua?”

“In the whole world? Sure. At least a dozen or so, I’d say. But here in Daria there’s not a town even close to comparing to it.”

❁

“Magic!?”

“Strictly speaking, it is a form of energy connecting all living beings. That breathes life into them. But it would be possible to manipulate it in ways that most human cultures may recognise as ‘magic’, yes.”

For a while, there was no noise but the steady rolling of the tide against the sandy shore as Gera tried to digest what Korin had told her.

“Well, I suppose I was always curious how the flowers could stop blooming and then just stay that way all through the year without dying. Magic sounds as plausible a reason as any, I suppose. But you’re telling me the citydwellers discovered magic is real and of all things decided to… harness it for electricity?”

“More or less. When concentrated, it is capable of powering generators at incredibly high levels of efficiency without producing a single speck of pollution, and it never runs out either.” Seeing the sceptic look on Gera’s face, she carried on. “It was the nation of Hera that discovered it first. This ‘magic’ — each nation names it differently, but I believe in your tongue it is Elisia — is thinly spread at the surface, invisible to the eye. But deep, deep underground, it flows thickly in great rivers and lakes of light. So, if you dig deeply enough, you can hit it from practically any spot in the world, as a group of scientists from Hera found out around two centuries ago while trying to see how deep they could drill. I won’t go into the grisly details, but there’s a scar of earth in southern Hera that’s still scorched bare even now. By the time they had sent some people up to investigate the sudden radio silence and then waited for another, larger group of scientists to show up, the initial release of magic had cooled, and they now had a convenient hole with direct access to the greatest discovery in human history. Throw in a decade or so of experimentation and they worked out not only how to harness it as a power source, but also safer methods for tapping into and containing it with less explosive results.”

Gera nodded slowly, intrigued by the sudden history lesson, if not fully convinced it was fact. “But how do we have it here in Ashlia? There’s certainly no love lost between us and Hera, so I can’t imagine they were kind enough to tell us all about it.”

Korin smiled and lay down flat on the sand dune. “No, they weren’t. You have some spies to thank for that. Once the secret was stolen from Hera, somebody else stole it from the thieves, and then somebody else stole it from them, and so on until the whole world knew. All of a sudden, energy independence was not only possible for all nations of the world, but relatively easy to achieve. Global hierarchies were turned on their heads almost overnight, and humanity experienced an explosion in technological innovation that hadn’t been seen since the first industrial revolution.” She picked up a pebble and examined it in the fading light of early sunset. “But then, you see, doctors started to notice that people who were spending prolonged periods of time around these power stations were healing from injury and illness much faster than you might normally expect, and their children living on-site were reaching heights far beyond the averages for their ages. Plantlife, too, flourished nearby. What really got them salivating, though, were experiments that revealed a link between high exposure to magic and longer lifespans in animals, with no reason to believe it would be any different for humans. So what do you think they did next?”

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly imagine,” responded Gera, rolling her eyes. “But considering I started this year with a cold that lasted for what felt like two months straight, I’m inclined to believe I am not currently benefiting from this quite literal magic medicine?”

Korin lifted her left hand from behind her head for a high-five, to which Gera obliged. “Very perceptive of you. As you would expect, the people in charge quickly took notice, and soon enough every major city was clearing out entire districts to drill down and build these power plants in their own back gardens. The following decades were a time of plenty for all, and the cities doubled in size many times over into the megalopolises you know today. Their residents, meanwhile, were loath to let the twin boons of longer, healthier lives and unlimited energy to go to waste, and not only grew more and more extravagant in their appetites, but also increasingly jealous of what they possessed. So, one by one, they began to cut themselves off, and left the rural rabble outside of their walls to stagnate ever since.”

Gera let out a whistle. “Well, I can’t deny it sounds like something they’d do. And it certainly goes a long way to explain why their cities are so fancy. But how do you even know all of this stuff?”

Korin turned to look at her and raised a single finger to her smiling lips.

⚘

“What do your mummy and daddy do for a living?” Klie asked. She was sat on the edge of a small river, her feet immersed in the water.

Glas was playing alone a little farther in, crouched slightly so that only her head was sticking out above the water. With a flick of her arms, she spun around at the sound of Klie’s voice. Glas had always felt she was rather smart for an eight-year-old, and yet Klie, who looked about the same age, was always teaching her all kinds of new things.

“Farmers,” she finally replied. “Mostly potatoes and carrots.”

“Any fruit trees?”

“Those things come from trees!?”

Klie smiled knowingly but refrained from explaining, choosing instead the inspect her toes as she wriggled them under the water. Glas took her silence in stride and returned to floating around in the water. When it came to Klie, questions were something she often asked, but rarely ever answered. Eventually, Klie looked back up and scanned their surroundings. She pointed towards the far bank.

“See those flowers?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you think they’re supposed to look like that?”

“I… guess? I haven’t seen them looking any other way. Weird stuff happens if you pull them out, though. But the adults get real mad if they find out you did it.”

“What if I told you they’re only supposed to stay looking that way for a few days, and until just before you were born, they did.” Glas playing around in the river’s current and gave Klie a quizzical look. “I mean it. They can look really pretty when they bloom.”

Glas stood and slowly waded over to join Klie on her rock beside the river. “So why’d don’t they… bloom now?” She had never heard the word before, and could not even begin to guess what it meant, but she was growing increasingly self-conscious about how ignorant she must seem to Klie.

“You know about the cities, right?”

Glas perked up at the opportunity to finally show off something she did know. Lifting both her fists, she started counting them off one finger at a time. “Uh-huh! There’s Tela and Mosrey and Ingel in Ashlia, and Yamur and Horb in Erva, and Dinvery and Ceral and Lop and Greel in Hera, and Regua in Roth, and… and… and Smi and Dira in Anor!”

Even the usually restrained Klie could not how impressed she was, prompting an ear-to-ear smile from Glas threatened to break beyond the boundaries of her cheeks.

“Well, then you know exactly who to blame.”

Without elaborating, she stood up and strode towards the centre of the river, where she dove underwater. Glas began to grow genuinely concerned after a couple of minutes had passed, only for Klie to resurface a little farther down the river. After swimming a few strokes back to shallower water nearby, she continued talking.

“Basically, there’s a kind of magical energy that connects all life on the planet. It’s pretty unimportant for humans and most animals, but small things that are rooted directly in the ground, like flowers, rely on it to live. But then the people in those big cities found a way to use it for power and started sucking it all up for themselves.” She slumped back down beside Glas. “Eventually, they sucked up so much magic that the rest of the world outside of the cities started running out of it, like sticking a sponge in a puddle. And that’s why the flowers stopped blooming and went to sleep, ‘cause otherwise they’d end up using what little magic they had left, and die.” Klie was growing increasingly agitated as she explained, and Glas had to lean away slightly to avoid being hit by her wildly gesturing arms. “Then without the flowers, all the little pollinating insects that relied on them started dying off, which was the beginning of the end for the rest of the food chain too. I mean, just look at this river! I haven’t seen a fish the entire time we’ve been here! Have you ever even eaten a fish? Or any meat? This is why your parents can’t grow anything that needs pollinating either!”

Glas nodded solemnly, hoping it was not obvious that she had only understood a portion of what she had just heard. She opened her mouth to talk, but paused a moment, looking Klie up and down. For a girl who had just been swimming, she was remarkably dry. More than that, her tanned skin was sparkled as if in sunshine, but there was no break in the clouds for any sun to shine through.

Klie cleared her throat. “You were going to say something?”

“R-Right… What about the cities then? I’ve never seen one, but they’re meant to be super big and full of people. Even with what Mummy and Daddy grow, we still get lots of food from the commissary. Like fruit and stuff. And I heard that all comes from the cities. If they need these insects and things so badly, how do the cities feed all their own people and then still have a bunch left over for us?”

“Remember what I said. All the problems you have here are because they’re hogging all the magic for themselves. So, since they have all the magic, they have none of your problems. In fact, they’re better off than they’ve ever been. Everywhere you look there are flowers blooming, and then they have big giant greenhouses underground where they grow all their food with technologies your parents could only ever dream of and pollinators both natural and artificial. Anyway, they only give away all that food so that you country bumpkins are fit enough to do the grunt work in their factories and mines while they live it large in the city.”

Glas gazed across the river at the patch of flower buds before turning to face Klie.

“That sucks. But what’re we supposed to do about it?”

Klie giggled.

🏵

Cren stood looking out through the window that comprised the greater part of his living room, a glass of wine in his hand. It was night, but the city outside glowed as bright as early morning, a forest of towers lit up from within and without. Looking down, the ground was a distant blur hidden behind a thin mist of vehicles flitting between the trunks.

Kwel rose from the sofa and walked over to his side. He had not known her for long, but the look of distaste on her face as she took in the view was clear.

“Was the wine not to your liking? Or is it the glorious march of human progress that displeases you?” He swung his arm widely with a dramatic flair, one corner of his mouth lifted in a smirk.

She turned her head only a hint, glaring at him from the corner of her eye. “Do you know what this ‘human progress’ has done to the world, all so that a privileged few can live in luxury?

Cren took a sip of the wine. “A privileged few? Not at all! I won’t deny life is good here, but when you make it possible for the best of us to excel, all benefit equally. Food grown in our greenhouses helps feed the entire nation, while the vaccines we develop keep them free of disease. Life expectancy has skyrocketed in the past few decades, both inside and outside of these city walls.” He saw Kwel open her mouth to speak, and silenced her with a raised hand. “Yes, yes. I have heard the rumours of what this has meant for the natural world as of late, but it is the universe’s cruellest law that nothing good comes free. Give us a few more years, and I’m sure we will find a way to reverse the trend. With the minds we have gathered in the great cities of the world, anything is possible.”

“You could simply transition to other forms of power.”

This elicited a bark of laughter from Cren. “Why would we willingly choose to regress? Shall we return to living in the mud as well? Then we won’t need any power at all, and the flowers can thrive in our shit.”

Kwel stepped closer to the window. All the way to the horizon, there was rarely a building shorter than twenty stories, with most boasting far more. Each and every one was spattered with brightly lit windows or neon-coloured signage. Rails snaked between them, carrying the masses back and forth across the metropolis, while the elite of the elites flew around freely in personal vehicles. Streets lined with trees and gardens painted with flowers in vibrant abundance, a sight which should bring her joy, made her feel nothing but nausea. She turned back to Cren with a smile.

“We shall see about that”

✾