A Road to Nowhere

They returned in silence.
Back through the trees, down the overgrown path, to the clearing where the markers had been staked months ago—
the site of the road that would never be.

The flags were still there.
So were the rusted survey poles, tangled in vines.

But something had changed.

Kai stepped ahead first.
He stopped at the spot where the first machine had broken ground—where the earth had cracked and wept.

He placed his palm on the soil.
Warm. Humming. Whole.

“It healed,” he whispered.

Hazel walked beside him, Cero at her side.
“No,” she said softly.
“It refused.”

Cairo knelt where the bulldozer had stalled that first day—its engine fried, its controls frozen.
He tapped the frame with the edge of his boot.
The metal was rusted clean through.

“They brought new equipment, you know.”

“And?” asked Orion, stepping up beside him.

“Didn’t matter.
Every machine that tried to dig here—froze, sparked, or simply shut down.
Some never turned on at all.”

Sienna nodded.
“Like the ground whispered no.”

They walked the length of the proposed route—what had once been flagged to become asphalt and noise.
Now? It was a corridor of light.

The trees were thicker.
The birds louder.
The moss vibrant and wide like a woven quilt.

And where the center of the road would have run, a quiet groove shimmered in the grass.
Not cut. Not pressed.

Grown.

Like a memory thread left behind by the earth itself.

Cero crouched beside it.
“It didn’t want to be carved.”
A pause.
“It wanted to be kept.”

Orion turned slowly to the group.

“Then that’s what we do.
We don’t pave this place.
We don’t map it.
We don’t name it.”

He smiled.

“We remember it.
Together.
Until it remembers us back again.”

And beneath their feet,
the pulse flickered once—
not to warn.

To welcome.