In the distant future, megacities cover the land with towering skyscrapers that reach far into the clouds. The ground below is now forgotten, infertile, and dead. To touch the ground was an act of nostalgia or even prayer, and soil once rich was now seen as an ancient relic of a world no longer known.
Until one day the earth cracked open ... Lyra froze, her hand still resting on the soil she’d been tending. It had suddenly shifted beneath her fingers and she watched as the soil swelled and split. Something began to push its way upward. Not a plant. Not stone. Something smooth and wet, like the surface of a river stone, had begun to emerge. It moved, it was alive.
The figure rose slowly, unhurried, as though the earth was reluctant to let it go. Its skin glistened like quartz catching the morning light, and its black eyes, glossy and unreadable, locked onto hers.
For a long moment, neither of them moved. The figure knelt back down to the soil, pressing its hands into the ground. Before long something impossible began to happen. The dirt began to move, darken, and even grew. Green shoots of grass sprouted forth and the patch of ground, long dead, now pulsed with life.
Lyra felt her chest tighten, something old and buried stirring deep within her.
News spread quickly of the Earthborn and with that came the attention of those far removed from the ground.
It wasn't long before they took the Earthborn away, it didn’t resist.
Lyra shouted herself hoarse that day, demanding answers, but the agents ignored her. As the sound of their boots faded into the silence of their departing vehicles, she was left alone, staring at the bare patch of soil where the Earthborn emerged.
She didn’t sleep that night. Her mind replayed the sight of the Earthborn’s glowing veins, the way the earth had responded to it. She dreamed of roots, deep and tangled, pulling her downward, into the dark. When she woke, her skin was damp with sweat, her breath heavy and the smell of soil in the air.
The Earthborn was classified as a potential threat, they’d said. That’s all they cared about. But Lyra couldn’t stop thinking about its eyes, how they seemed to look past her and into something much older. Calling to her even …
She felt it—still, faint, like the pull of a tide.
Lyra wasn’t the only one changed by the Earthborn.
News of the arrival of its arrival spread, though she didn’t know how. Whispers turned into rumors, and soon its image began to appear in the lower districts of the megacities. People called it a savior, painting murals of its amber eyes beneath golden leaves.
Cult-like influence followed and The Children of the Soil rose from the cracks in the system. They were people who had grown up choking on artificial air, their homes hidden in the shadows of the towering megacities. They believed the Earthborn could bring something back—something they’d never had.
Lyra wanted to stay out of it. She told herself it wasn’t her fight. But she couldn’t ignore the tug she felt every time her hands touched the ground.
When the Children came for her, their faces bright with urgency, she couldn't say no.
The air inside the bio-lab that held the Earthborn was sharp and sterile, heavy with the hum of machines.
Lyra mind barely registered the alarms as they broke in. She followed the others through the corridors, her heart pounding, her legs moving as if something else was pulling her forward. She could feel it now—the Earthborn. Its presence vibrated in her chest, her ribs aching with the weight of it.
When she entered the lab, Lyra stopped.
The Earthborn now stood in the center of the room, taller and much different than before. Its skin had changed, no longer smooth it now resembled bark, dark and veined. Its amber eyes glowed, brighter than any light in the room, and the air around it felt alive and ancient.
Lyra stepped forward. “What are you?” she whispered.
The Earthborn turned its gaze to her, and she felt it - it spoke no words, but something deeper, a flood of images and sensations. She saw forests, rivers, and fields bursting with life. But she also saw storms, crumbling towers, and cities swallowed by overgrown roots.
It wasn’t here to preserve what was. It was here to rebuild.
It began without a word.
The Earthborn raised its arms, and the ground beneath it split open. Roots burst through the floor, weaving outward in thick, knotted veins. Lyra reached out, her fingers brushing its bark-like arm, and felt the pull surge through her, deeper than before.
The Earthborn’s body twisted, elongated, its torso thickening into a trunk. Its arms stretched skyward, its fingers fusing into branches that burst into golden leaves.
Lyra fell to her knees, breathless, as the room collapsed around her. The lab’s walls crumbled, the ceiling torn apart by the canopy stretching above. She didn’t move. She couldn’t.
After the dust settled, the Earthborn was gone and a massive tree stood in its place.
This tree quickly became the epicenter of the world. Its roots buried so deep into the earth that it stretched across continents bringing forth life long forgotten. Around the base of the tree, people began creating small green villages, their lives now once again woven into the ground.
The Children of the Soil became its stewards, tending to the earth as it healed itself. They spoke of the Earthborn with reverence, but Lyra’s name was rarely mentioned. Some said she had disappeared into the tree that day, her body absorbed by its roots. Others say they have seen her in the forests, her hands caked in soil.
As time passed the legends grew but one thing remained true, beneath the tree’s canopy, the air is always calm and warm - and if you stand there long enough, you can even feel a faint but steady pulse, like the beating of a heart.
