[color=green][center][h1]The Green Tide[/h1][/center][/color]

The first signs were dismissed as coincidence.

Seeds sprouted where none had fallen. Vines split stone that had stood unbroken since before memory. Fields greened overnight, crops rising far too fast, their stalks thick and dark, their leaves veined with an unfamiliar richness. Farmers spoke in uneasy tones of harvests that should not exist yet. Hunters found paths swallowed in moss between one sunrise and the next

In the deserts, where sand had ruled unchallenged, green bled through the dunes. Tough shoots pierced the crusted earth, drinking from nothing anyone could name. Cacti swelled and twisted into new forms, their shadows stretching unnaturally long. Dry riverbeds cracked open as creeping roots forced their way through ancient stone. Those that lived that swore the ground pulsed beneath their feet at night, warm and faintly alive.

In the far north, ice groaned and split as pale growths spread across frozen plains. Lichen bloomed in sheets where only death had endured. Dark needles pushed up through snow, steaming gently in the cold air, refusing to freeze. Even the glaciers showed veins of green threading through their fractured faces, as if something deep beneath the ice had finally exhaled.

Forests became something else entirely. Trees thickened, bark swelling and knitting over old scars. Canopies closed so tightly that daylight dimmed at noon. Roots rose from the soil like grasping limbs, breaking roads, walls and graves alike. Animals fled or vanished, unsettled by the way the woods no longer waited to grow but pressed outward, claiming space with quiet urgency.

And everywhere, in every land, those who listened too closely felt it. A pressure behind the eyes. A warmth under the skin. The sense that the world was remembering something it had been forced to forget. 

Everywhere, in the same instant, something flared. The raw sensation of power itself. It washed over the world. Those sensitive to it felt their breath catch. Those who were not paused, struck by a sudden pressure in the air, like the moment before a storm breaks. It was magic. Not shaped, not restrained, not diluted. Magic as it had existed before the Storm tore it apart, before even the rules of magic existed in the first place. 

It vanished almost immediately. No more than a blink. A fraction of a second. Too brief to grasp, too sudden to stop. Yet it was long enough. Long enough for old wards to tremble and fail. Long enough for dormant runes to crack and go dark. Across the world, relics turned warm, springs boiled for a breath and shadows bent the wrong way before snapping back into place.

Those who had lived before the Storm would know the truth. This was not a resurgence. This was not a return. It was the last exhale of something dying at last or perhaps the first gasp of something awakening. No one could say which. But every nation, every people, every living thing now knew the same certainty. Magic caused the destruction that will follow.