Prompt

(illustration by Jeff Easley) The trees that were once living and breathing are now nothing more than brittle, jagged structures, their skeletal forms thrusting up like the remnants of some ancient, long-buried city. Their bark is gone, reduced to mineralized plates layered over one another like scales. Above, where leaves once shook in the wind, chandeliers of calcified resin hang like inverted stalactites, dripping slow trails of glowing mineral onto the ground. A sound—distant, unnatural—echo