The air was heavy with silence, a quiet so deep it felt like a weight pressing against my chest. I hadn’t seen the sun in days; a sickly haze clung to the sky, dulling even the memory of warmth. I walked through the once-familiar path that led to the woods, but where towering oaks and whispering pines had stood, there was nothing now but barren earth. The trees were gone—no stumps, no fallen trunks—just an endless stretch of cracked soil that stretched far beyond the horizon.

I reached out instinctively, my fingers grasping for a branch that no longer existed. The world had become a place where nothing lived, where even the wind had given up trying to howl. And in that moment, I realized with a sinking dread that this was no nightmare. This was the world we had created.

"Don’t wake in the world where all the trees died," my grandmother used to say, warning us of a future none of us had believed possible. But now, her words echoed in the empty air, a haunting prophecy fulfilled.