The Last Station Standing
The harvest was coming in, but the wheat was the color of bone.
Six months had passed since the Great Stillness, and the village of New Orizon had become a sanctuary of Agrarian-Survival (subsistence living based on manual farming). The mountain valley, once a site of cosmic trauma, was now a tapestry of tilled earth and timber cabins. Kazimir had traded his pulse-blade for a heavy iron plow, his broad shoulders now tanned and corded with the honest muscle of a laborer. He looked like a man of the earth, yet his eyes—ever watchful—still scanned the treeline for ghosts that no longer haunted the woods.