The Wish

As the storm bore down, the village seemed on the brink of obliteration. Winds howled like living things, tearing roofs from homes and sending fragments of wood and stone tumbling through the air. A wall of churning sand and lightning advanced relentlessly, swallowing everything in its path.

The villagers huddled together, desperation etched on their faces. Lyra stood amidst them, the orb in her hands, glowing faintly as though waiting.

The orb felt impossibly warm in her hands, its smooth surface cool against her palms, as she stood at the edge of the wind-torn plateau. The storm raging around her. The orb pulsed faintly, like a heart waiting to sync with its bearer, but Lyra hesitated, the world around her dimmed. She was lost in the stories that had shaped her. 

Her grandmother had often spoken of the Collapse—not as a distant catastrophe, but as the moment the world unraveled before their eyes. “The sky turned black,” she had said once, her voice brittle with age and sorrow. “Not from storms, but from the smoke of burning cities. We were hungry for months, but it was the silence that broke us. No messages, no answers, nothing.”

Lyra’s mother had been a child then, but she had lived long enough to remember her own mother’s desperation. “The old world didn’t die cleanly,” her mother would say. “It clawed at us on the way down, and it left scars we could never see but always felt.”

And Meera—wiry, sharp-eyed Meera—had spoken of the years after, the hollow times when hope flickered like a candle in the wind. “We thought we were too clever to fail,” Meera had told her, seated on a broken bench as they shared rations in some forgotten town. “Even when the systems started to crumble, we believed we could patch things up. It wasn’t until the Creche emerged that we saw how wrong we’d been. The Earth wasn’t waiting for us to catch up; it was letting us go.”

Lyra closed her eyes and let the stories fill her, their echoes running deep. Her own life had been shaped in their wake, a time of scavenging for meaning as much as for sustenance. The collapse wasn’t just a wound on the Earth—it was a tear in the soul of her people, a reminder of what they had squandered.

The orb thrummed in her hands, pulling her back to the present. She opened her eyes, staring into its light, which seemed to mirror the hopes she had carried since childhood. Meera’s words came back to her then: 

“If you ever get the chance to rebuild, don’t rebuild what was. Build what should have been.”

Lyra exhaled slowly, her resolve hardening. This wasn’t just a wish for her; it was a promise to those who had endured the Collapse, to those who had believed there could be more. She would weave their stories into this new reality.

She stepped forward and whispered her intention to the orb.

“I want…” she began, her voice trembling. Then she steadied herself, speaking over the storm:

“I want humans and Creche to work together to heal this planet.”