I pushed open the rough wooden door, its stone pivots scraping in their sockets. The air outside hit me at once, heavy and cold, charged with an electrical tension that had nothing natural about it. I stepped onto the porch.
The sky was not black yet, but it was no longer blue either. On the horizon, where the mountains usually cut sharp teeth into the evening light, something was moving. It was neither cloud nor fog, but a swirling mass, too dense to be wind and too dark to be rain, as if a giant finger were stirring the soup of the sky and the vortex was pulling the light toward its center.
I narrowed my eyes. Without the necklace, the atomic noise would already have overwhelmed my perception, millions of bonds flashing and Ether currents crashing into one another like waves against rocks. With the polished quartz against my skin, I could look without being blinded.
I held out a hand toward the horizon. Normally, Ether flowed. Out there, it was fleeing, like startled ants all racing toward the same hole. At the center, where the sky twisted, it no longer formed any kind of network. It spiraled into a black vortex that swallowed everything passing within reach.
Before I could even put my observations in order, the conclusion arrived.
Less than a day.
It was the same kind of certainty you get when a glass tips over the edge of a table. You know it is going to break before it hits the floor.
I lowered my hand.
Shit.
I turned on my heel and went back inside, slamming the door behind me. The silence of the cabin closed around me. I stayed there for a moment with my back against the wood and my eyes shut, feeling as though I had solved a difficult equation far too quickly and disliked the answer.
I opened my eyes again. The room was there, solid and reassuring. The ash walls I had assembled myself, joint by joint, with enough patience to give me blisters and plenty of moments wondering whether the whole thing would collapse at once. The hearth, giving off comforting heat. And everywhere, between the planks and the stones of the chimney, luminous tendrils ran along the grain of the wood while golden capillaries linked the stones together like veins beneath the skin of a sleeping giant.
I reached for the nearest wall. Under the pressure of my fingers, the fibers did not bend. They redistributed their internal tension through tiny microscopic adjustments. Over the past few weeks, I had learned not to force things anymore. I listened instead, the way you rest a finger on a guitar string without plucking it, just to feel the vibration before the note.
Didn't know I had a poet in me.
Since the storm would not arrive before nightfall, I made one last round of my supplies, starting with the cave that now served as my cellar.
The beans were firm and intact, with no trace of mold despite the humidity. Their pods, normally fragile, looked reinforced, as though the fibers had absorbed an extra dose of Ether while growing, and some were comfortably over twenty centimeters long.
I lifted the lid of a wooden bin packed with red squashes. Their thick skins had a dull sheen in the wavering light of my grease lamp. One of them had to weigh five kilos. I tapped it with my fingertips and got back a low, full sound, with a density I would never have expected from a squash.
Cellular modification? Starch accumulation?
The Jerusalem artichokes made even less sense. Their tubers, normally knobbly and irregular, had grown straight, almost sculpted, with protrusions forming geometric patterns that seemed to have been guided from within. Some were longer than my forearm, and their skins were so smooth you would have wondered whether they had ever touched soil.
I put everything back with an amused sigh.
“I've never had a green thumb, either. I think my vegetable garden has turned into an open-air quantum biology lab.”
The idea was both exciting and mildly terrifying, but at least I was not going to starve this winter.
I looked toward the horizon, shading my eyes with one hand and putting on a serious expression.
“No environmentalists in sight, though.”
I laughed like an idiot at my own joke and headed back toward the cabin. I was probably getting close to the ultimate eco-friendly ideal. The impossible fusion of humans with the forces of Nature.
The ladder to the loft creaked under my weight. Up there, the air was drier, almost dusty, thick with the smell of dried herbs and wood. Light came through the small quartz pane set between the roof planks, and the Ether drifted more than it flowed, hanging in faint trails that followed the warm air rising from the hearth.
I crouched beside the chest where I had stored the buckwheat. The seeds, normally tiny and brittle, had swollen until they looked like brown glass beads, heavy and faintly ridged. And yet they had kept for weeks without rotting, sprouting too early, or attracting insects.
Along the wall, the herbs hung in tight bundles. The sage had developed leaves twice their usual size. The thyme spread in dense mats with stems far woodier and thicker than they should have been, and the dried elderberries still held an intense purple, as if time had stopped for them. I took a sage leaf between my fingers and crushed it. The scent burst out, strong and concentrated, with the usual earthy note underneath.
“These plants are not normal, and I'm not going to complain.”
I shook my head and climbed back down, laughing to myself. Downstairs, I added another log to the hearth, counted the firewood stacked in the cave one last time, and brought in the tools that were still lying outside. I had enough to last a long while.
All that was left was to wait.