Day 6: Ash Harvest

The boy remembered the city as light. Streets that never slept, towers that breathed fog, the sound of trams gliding through glass canyons. All of it gone in a single morning when the sky turned red.

Now the world was quiet.

Isaac Caulder was twelve when the flare took his parents. One moment they were in their apartment above the river, his father tuning the home terminal, his mother watching the horizon. Then came the light. The next thing he knew, he was standing in a field far from home, the skyline behind him burning like paper.

The farmers who found him said little. They gave him food, then work. He earned his place through sweat and silence. His hands learned to dig, to carry, to mend. The machines they kept alive were old, the kind that ran on fuel and stubbornness.

The land was harsh but alive. Smoke drifted in from the dead cities, but crops still grew in patches. Rain came seldom, heavy and gray. Isaac spent hours staring at the soil, wondering why this small piece of earth had survived when everything else had fallen apart.

At night, he listened to the adults talk in low voices. About radiation. About the fires. About the sky that refused to turn black. They spoke as if the world had turned its back on them.

But Isaac still looked up. Sometimes the aurora pulsed in yellow instead of red, faint and rhythmic. He counted the seconds between each glow. It felt like a pattern, not a trick of light.

When the others slept, he wrote in an old notebook he had carried from the city. His mother’s initials were pressed into the cover. Inside, he filled the pages with numbers, sketches, and ideas that no one else cared to understand.

He told himself he would learn what had happened. Not for the world, not for the dead, but for them.

In the distance, something blinked. A steady light from the direction of the ruins. Not fire. Not lightning. Something else.

Isaac closed the notebook and whispered to the dark, “You’re still out there.”

[End Transmission]