The World also started to change.
The change did not arrive with thunder.
No crack of lightning split the sky open. No tremor rolled through the earth to announce what was coming. It crept in at the edges, the way most things that matter tend to do. Quietly. In places where no one was paying close enough attention.
The first place was a forest in northern Canada.
Not a famous forest. Not a protected wilderness that drew researchers or tourists.
Just trees. Thousands of them, standing the way they had always stood, growing at the glacial, indifferent pace that trees have always grown. Unremarkable. Familiar. Old in the comfortable, unassuming way that old things are when nobody needs them to be anything else.
Cole Harris had walked that trail for years.
