009 Orchards

More prose. I need to give up on this being a poetry challenge at all. XD

Context: In a post-apocalyptic future, an ancient demon tells a hyena-woman and a simple human male a little about what happened to the world...

"It all began with the orchards. The climate was rapidly shifting, and winters were too mild. Trees that had evolved to perfectly fit their environment no longer got the right signals. Spring came and they didn't bloom. I know that doesn't mean anything to you, spring and winter and all that."

"I know what spring is," Hilde said.

"No, you have a word for the blooming season, but you don't understand the way it used to be. Places didn't move. They stayed put, and the seasons changed as the planet spun. You know that much, right? The planet spins."

Her ear flicked, revealing a little annoyance at the question. "I know."

"How can it spin?" Nico asked. "Wouldn't we be thrown off the surface?"

"Gravity holds everything on," Uduak said.

"That sounds highly dubious."

Uduak chuckled. "Wait'll we get to Arcadya. You'll see the sun, the stars. If they've still got astronomers, they'll show you the math. Then you'll see."

Nico grumbled under his breath, still skeptical.

"Anyway, the seasons. They used to come and go like clockwork, and the temperatures varied, but you could count on winter being cold and summer being warm and the rain falling in certain months, stuff like that. But people made it change. Deforestation, ozone-depleting pollution, carbon and other dangerous stuff drilled from the ground, burned into gas. It's been so long, I don't even remember all the ways it went wrong, but humans, man--" He laughed and fell back against the seat. "They wanted to put metal panels up in the sky, reflect the sun back out."

Nico tried to imagine looking up to see shimmery metal patches instead of swirling haze. The whole thing seemed absurd. If gravity held things down, how would it stay up there? How would you even get it there in the first place? He started to imagine four planes, one on each corner, hauling a massive, wobbly sheet of metal into the air. Madness.

Hilde took a bite of her apple, teeth crunching through the yellow flesh. The unbitten half still shone its mottled purple and blue, and she spun it lazily on the table. "You said something about an orchard."

"Oh. Yes." Uduak's amusement faded away. "I remember it was a big thing, and people sort of chose it as the marker, as if the world had been fine before that one, devastating spring. Thousands of acres of orchard had failed to blossom, the largest failure yet. To those of Father's side, the death of the apple meant it was time, time to begin the apocalypse. Something to do with evil being fully unleashed or something. I dunno. Those people never did make much sense. Anyway, for those who valued nature, those apples were a warning. They worked tirelessly, building a sanctuary to protect a small portion of life from whatever ravages the planet was about to endure. In later days, they added features to help it withstand the wrath of Father, and they gave it an old name for paradise - Arcadya."

"Is that why," Hilde murmured, "On all the stones encircling Arcadya, there's a carving of a tree?"

He shrugged. "Could be. Or maybe it's for all the trees planted inside. The dryads really were the crowning achievement, greater than the baphomets, greater even than me."

"Why?" Nico asked. "What can these dryad things do?"

Uduak took the last quarter of Hilde's apple, ignoring her soft chuff of irritation. He held it with reverence in his cupped hands and leaned over the table. "A dryad could take this and grow you a tree in a fraction of the time. Maybe one year to reach maturity, instead of five, and if the signal's not there, if winter never comes and tells it to grow, a dryad can whisper it a wake-up call."

He handed the fruit back to Hilde, who bit in sharply as if to remind him how firm her bite was. Unconcerned, Uduak leaned further over the table, directing his comments to Nico. "Forget intelligence and strength. A dryad can create life. Father and the sons might not realize the immensity of that, but the creators of Arcadya did, and when you see it, something tells me you will, too."

Nico turned to the window, watching the ashen, corroded terrain roll by. For all the descriptions he'd heard, there was still a blankness in his mind when he tried to picture Arcadya. All he knew of trees were gnarled, blackened things that crouched at the edge of toxic, fetid pools. A place full of that was hardly his idea of 'paradise', but that didn't really matter. This journey had been out of his hands since the moment it began.

Hilde set the apple core down, though it tipped over immediately. Little black seeds shone from the hollow space at its center, fascinating in all the potential they held. Nico hadn't known what a seed was until he met her, hadn't seen an apple or tasted anything beyond the fiber bars and nutrient drinks. He hadn't said more than a few sentences to a female and certainly never sat beside one as companion and friend instead of dutiful breeder.

Apparently, his stare lingered too long on the core, because Uduak suddenly asked, "Had yours today?"

They were on strict rations. No one knew how long it would be until they found more, so they were limited to one a day, along with a share of the meat and vegetables. Nico usually saved his apple for the evenings. He wasn't sure why, but he shook his head and his old captain reached into the cupboard to get him one. It was tossed over, and Nico caught it, running his thumb over the oddly shiny and smooth skin, like a little protective shield. He bit in, savouring the sweet, juicy crunch as he again stared at the barren wastelands.