In light we blossomed; in shadows we fed.

We absorbed illumination, opening our petals to the sun. The sun coaxed us from our roots upward into the light. Tracking the rays, feasting, growing—sunflowering was simple as that. Love radiated throughout the glimmering world, the shine reaching every corner, every crevice.

And you stole it, human kind.

Civilization brought The Darkening upon us, shrouding the world in pitch. We didn't know how you did it. Some of us guessed poison. Others said humans exhaled a black fog into the clouds, thick and impenetrable. And other flowers whispered of dark magic, of spirits—a theory which most of flower-kind laughed off. Spirits? We live amongst graves. The spirits fed us. Lived in us. Were us.

But no amount of answer-seeking could undo the sun's disappearance, its possible death—or worse still, its abandonment.

The changes occurred suddenly. The days were only dusk, and nights lasted twice as long. The moment we realized the sun was truly gone, the moon disappeared too. Without sunlight, so too went the moon's ethereal silver, its lunar visibility. With all light extinguished, there was only night.

And with darkness came the cold, a perpetual frostbite.

A giant dome was erected, humanity's home. A thin white glow traced its immense form. We couldn't access its secrets, and only knew the fact of its safety and refuge. The overbearing steel prevented the ice sheets, the constant blizzards, from harming a single human hair.

Starved of sunlight, we stared at the glowing dome, the rejection of its white steel.

The cold clamped to our petals, hardening us into crystals. A swift death, that's what we expected. But it never came. The millions of us were petrified within the frost and darkness, silently observing the coming years of blizzard. We were sunflowers one day and ice blossoms the next, and though we couldn't grasp the mechanism of our continued survival, we were grateful.

The rest of the creatures were not so fortunate—they were frozen. We no longer felt the rustle of animal activity, or the adhesive legs of small insects. But the dead strengthened us. As their bodies fertilized our roots, their spirits howled against the crying winds. The multitudes of vanquished animals offered themselves, a tribute of nutrients and mercy.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

One day you and a partner ventured outside the dome, our first human sighting in years. When the dome cracked open, granting you passage into our blackened, frostbitten territory, we witnessed the secret to humanity's survival, the criminal ingenuity of your kind.

Pure illumination. Light emitted all throughout the inside of the human shelter. It was vast and white. There was no heat, no proof of solar life, only its captured light. You'd devised your own sun, one that didn't scorch the planet and redden your soft, fleshy rinds. A controlled, sterilized environment. A human utopia. Captured sunlight was the final frontier, the ultimate addition to the dome. You needed nothing else yet curiosity brought you out of the dome. You had an eye for ruin, a taste for it.

You both wore special suits. There were helmets on your heads, holographic displays over your eyes. Your suits even emitted ultraviolet beams from the forehead, a visual aid to study the world you'd blinded.

"Sure is dark out here."

"Cold, too."

"Thank goodness for these suits."

"And the dome!"

"It's like we never needed the sun at all.

"Poor sun! Wherever it went, I hope it makes some friends!"

A pause.

"Nah!" In unison.

Laughter. Laughter.

We were an apocalyptic punchless at best, sunless, ruined. But we were grateful, too, accepting of the ice which took us in and reinvented us in its image. We were blessed to be reinvented as crystals while the rest of the planet disintegrated. But the comment was noted. The callousness, the carelessness. You'd reappeared, intruders once more.

The light shined on us. The sun's rays. Our stolen savior condensed into a helmet.

"Are they flowers?"

"Whoa, think they're alive?"

"Dunno, but what a discovery!"

"Let's pot these suckers!"

"Absolutely."

They approached us, blasting us with light. Our first warmth in years. Within that shine, we tried to feel the sun. We tried and tried to regain the feelings of the old world. But no matter how hard we strained inside ourselves to return to our sunbright ways, we couldn't synthesis an ounce of love. Darkness is fact, darkness is the whole of the world, comfortable and certain. And once your streak of light beamed the darkness away, we were reminded of a world long missed, our lost splendor of heat and gold. But a farce is a farce, and the light would leave as soon as your helmets took it away. Darkness. That was the sole truth, the sole future. And in the pitch flowers must eat, flowers must act to live.

The helmet heads inched closer, the light intensifying, a nostalgic burn, a cruel, cruel lie.

A hand inched forward and cupped a petal.

The petal cracked, breaking dead crystals into your palm.

And as it shattered, our petals froze strategically, sharpening into teeth.