I was turning compost this morning.

  Old leaves, kitchen scraps, last year’s tomato vines...all the small deaths that feed new life. I layered them carefully, watered them lightly, and let the microbes do what they have done for millions of years. In a few months this pile will be dark, rich, fragrant. It will feed whatever I plant next.

  That is the part I tend.

  But the Geostrataverse is not a garden.

  It is a wilderness.

  Life is everywhere.

  Between the strata, in the thin films of moisture that cling to stone, microbes and fungi weave invisible networks older than any Bell.

  In the great voids there are lakes of fresh water so vast that entire civilizations of blind, pale fish that have never seen sunlight.

  Enormous cave-white leviathans drift through those black waters, singing songs too low for human ears, their bodies glowing with bioluminescence that has never known a Royal’s command.

  There are concavities where the air itself is alive...thick with spores that bloom into floating forests.

  There are realms where the rock itself breathes, where crystal lattices grow into cities that sing in frequencies no human throat could ever match.

  There are places where life thrives so completely that people could not survive even a single breath...too much oxygen, too much pressure, too much beauty.

  Most of it has no name.

  The distances between the named realms alone are staggering.

  You can cross from one known concavity to another and pass through a hundred unnamed strata, each one its own quiet world, each one older than any empire.

  The loneliness is vast.

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  The silence is vast.

  The life is vaster still.

  The Royal Nephilim control only the tiniest fragments...polished concavities, ordered gardens, carefully tended bloodlines.

  They ring their Bells and pretend the wilderness is tamed.

  But the wilderness does not care.

  It simply continues.

  It grows in the cracks.

  It sings in the dark.

  It remembers every seed, every spore, every forgotten creature that ever lived.

  And every seed planted, every cub born, every kit, fawn, calf, chick...every new life...is not a commodity.

  It is a message.

  A message to a tomorrow that might be just a little better than today.

  A fifty-year-old man does not plant a black walnut tree for himself.

  He plants it for the shade it will cast long after he is gone, for the nuts that will feed children who never knew his name, for the roots that will hold soil together when his hands can no longer do it.

  I finished turning the compost and patted it smooth.

  Then I planted one row of the old beans...the speckled ones that don’t look perfect but taste like home.

  I scattered a handful of saved seeds from last year’s sunflowers.

  I left space for the wild things that will inevitably find their way in.

  Spring is coming.

  It always does.

  And while the Royals play their games of control and the technogods chase deletion and glory, the wilderness keeps growing.

  Quietly.

  Patiently.

  Endlessly.

  It does not need our permission.

  It only needs us to remember that we are not the gardeners of this world.

  We are only one small row in a garden that has no edge...and every seed we plant is a promise to the tomorrow that waits beyond it.

  - Bloom