Ex Tenebris

She waited for the mist to thin before taking the ridge road. It had been years since anyone had called it a road. Grass pushed through potholes, stones slipped loose from the culverts, and every rusted guardrail had fallen to the valley below. The maples came back first, red shoots along the gullies, unbothered by what the years had erased.

By midday, she reached the spot. The house, or what used to be one, slumped into the hillside, as if it were trying to disappear. Roof beams collapsed inward. The chimney leaned, held aloft by its habit more than its strength.

For a while, she just stood there, watching the smoke of her breath mingle with the fog and join the mountainside. The air was now a mix of rusted iron and pine sap. Somewhere far down the slope, a brook found its way again through the receding ice. She listened until she could separate that thin music from the faint roaring that still lived in her memory—the sound the world had made when it did not quite end, only broke and went quiet in the wrong places.

She walked inside. The floorboards had given up years ago. She was careful to walk where the beams stretched across the frame. Ferns feathered their way through open seams, soft and bright and alive against the rot. Her boots brushed the fragments of glass that caught what little light could reach this high. Some walls stood, resolute. Colorless wallpaper peeled off in long tongues, curling around the memory of framed squares that had once held photographs.

The silence inside felt deliberate. It was not the old, comfortable hush of a house between conversations, but something that had settled after the last voice faded. For a time, she thought of turning back, but this moment called to her. She eventually set her pack on the remains of a table and drew from it a small tin of what used to be mints. It was about the size of a deck of cards and proved invaluable as a travel companion in these times. Within the tin was a small, half-used votive candle and an Eastern white pine sapling, wrapped carefully in waxed cloth. The sapling was no bigger than her index finger, but it aspired to grow majestically in those woods. She promised the sapling would eventually tower above its peers and become the steeple of a new cathedral, and her old home would be the nave and sanctuary of this place.

It had been eighteen, maybe nineteen years since everything changed. There had been a season when the sky looked wrong for months at a time, when everything tasted sour on the tongue and the nights buzzed with a faint, directionless hum. For a long time after, nothing here had grown true; the earth clutched at every tendril, and the woods stood like a congregation of understatements. People vanished in waves. Some to hunger, some to sickness, some simply walking out into the dark and not walking back. That quiet had laid itself over the hills as surely as any snowfall. That drastic shift for humanity left its mark on nature as well.

The storms came plain again, gray and full of rain. The nights were dark as they should be. Rivers had begun to clear, and grass worked its way back through cracks in the stones. Far below, in the valleys, she’d even seen lights returning. There were small settlements pushing firelight and smoke into the evening, with a few voices now carrying on in the wind. Those who remained lived differently now, careful but awake, fearful but grateful, for the chance to start again. It was as though the earth had granted them a second chance without explaining why.

The faded yellow Bic lighter still worked. The sound of it was sharp, like a bird breaking from cover. The candle flame caught small, uncertain at first, then steadied. The light made the hollow room seem wholehearted for a moment. She set the candle in the hearth where rain could not drown it.

From her coat, she took a small flask of water brought from the valley well. It was pure, clear, alive. She went outside and knelt by the old steps right next to what used to be the back porch. That soil was black, cool, and ready. It was right there that she chose to plant the sapling. Its few leaves shook despite the still air. She cupped her hands around it and poured some of the water at its base, watching it sink into the ground.

She turned her head back and up toward the right. A single thread of smoke climbed from what was left of the chimney, as if the bricks remembered their place now.

The wind changed. The clouds pulled apart above her, revealing a narrow slice of sun. Across the valley, light moved along the ridges. Those golden beams reached out slowly, almost cautiously, touching the high grass and shrubs that had survived the bad years.

Birds had returned. Not many. Just enough to remind her that the world had decided it wasn't ready to call it quits just yet.

She stood up and brushed the mud from her knees. That sapling held straight, its green a shock and a promise against the ruin. She took one last glance inside the house, at that precious candle flame unmoved by the breeze, and then closed what remained of the back door. It swung to, its latch catching for the first time in years.

As she descended toward the stream, she took one last look back at her old place, now quietly given over to those hills. The air felt thin and listening, as if the ground itself were drawing in a slow, first breath, ready to exhale. The sound of the stream came up to meet her, growing louder with each stride. Somewhere beyond the ridge, a low shimmer of color lingered in the clouds. It wasn’t a storm, and it wasn’t the aurora, only a slight bending of the light, as though the sky had paused for a moment to remember what she’d done.

The hills kept their silence, and in that silence the once fragile light took hold.