The Great Weathering

It didn't begin with a storm. It began in a laboratory.

Years before the rivers failed, the scientists announced a breakthrough. They had engineered a living solution to problems that had not yet arrived: drought, energy collapse. One organism, they claimed, would feed the hungry and fuel the future. It would grow where nothing else could. It would solve tomorrow before tomorrow came.

They called it preparation. Others called it playing God.

It didn't wait for famine or fuel shortages. Once released into the wild, it spread with a hunger its makers had not accounted for. It drank the water and tore apart the root networks that held the ground together.

Ordinary families paid first. Farmers who had never set foot in a laboratory watched fields collapse. Timber crews found growth choking the forests that sustained them.

They had not engineered it or authorized it. But it consumed their world just the same.

Communities scattered into the emptiness. Some followed anyone who claimed to understand what had happened.

The scientists called it a miscalculation. Most called it arrogance.

The truth hardened with the soil.

The Great Weathering marks Year Zero in the recorded memory of Halidom. The moment the old world fractured.

And not every consequence of that era has unfolded.