Distance

2082

“It is a strange thing, up here, the sky is so close, and everything else is so very far away...” He said.

“Doesn't feel so close” She mumbled, lungs grasping for so little oxygen.

The valley below teemed with life, a riot of greens against high, steep basalt and tiny sparkling flecks of snow. The last of so many things, the hope of the world. Hoots and warbles and the constant twitter of tiny birds filled the thin air.

Life was never meant to be here. The roof of the world had become a garden it shouldn't have been. A constant stream of life workers in green and grey traipsed up and down the mountain with more errands than their were trees here. Some carried grey canisters of new life samples, some drove tracked cats filled with carefully curated dirt from the Nders down valley.

The world had risen up the mountain side with the heat, and their duty had followed it. The maintenance of refugia was a sacred task, none more so than than here.

She tended to a tiny carpet of new shoots gripping the top of an outcropping. The pioneers had come and gone under the Nders stewardship and her life had moved in to hold the thin soil in place. The dark sky watched dispassionately as she worked, while the cloud banks below boiled and raged flashed up at them. Like slow angry breakers crashing against the coast.

He saw her looking “At least the plains will get water...”

The tiny leaves flickered in the wind, tenacious and unknown to this altitude, they would form the next generation. Their tough stems would trap the air and hand it down to further increase soil mass. Their hold was tenuous, but previous, like this place. They would hold in trust the life they could, an army engaged in the most desperate triage, fighting without honour against the long enmity those left below had earned.