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Artist
(As it’s told in the reclaimer camps)
They say the forests on the old world never really died.
They just learned to wait.
Back when the last sky-haulers fell and the saws all went quiet, the woods grew faster than
memory. Whole continents went dark beneath their own canopies. Machines were swallowed,
roads forgotten, satellites blind with green.
So the Foundries built a walker.
Tall as a story, blue as the yoke that first taught oxen how to pull the sun across a field. Its
plates were painted that color on purpose — not for camouflage, but for kinship. A promise,
maybe. Or a joke only the engineers understood.
They called it Babe at first, in the old way — the way you name something dangerous so it
won’t feel lonely.
It did not cut trees the way men once did.
It gripped them.
Held them long enough to feel the grain, the tension, the years wound tight inside the trunk
— and then tore them free with the patience of mountains and the strength of storms.
The ground learned its footfalls.
The forest learned to lean away.
Some swear the walker hums as it works — a deep, steady resonance that makes the leaves
tremble before the trunk breaks. Others say it listens. That sometimes it pauses with one hand
braced against a great old tree, as if the two of them are remembering something together.
No one knows who built the first one anymore.
Only that when it moves through the fog, the birds go silent, the soil shivers, and the old
camps whisper:
That’s not a machine.
That’s a story learning how to walk.
And far back in the timberline, beyond the reach of radios, you can still find the prints — not
hooves, not wheels — but something heavier than either, pressed deep into the patience of
the earth.
Blue as the yoke.
Tall as a story.
And still working.