The silver had settled into the world the way dew settles into grass before sunrise: invisible until light touches it, then suddenly everywhere at once.No one announced the change. There were no proclamations from surviving councils, no final treaties signed in triplicate, no monuments unveiled with speeches that lasted longer than the attention of the audience. The change arrived the way seasons arrive in places that have forgotten what seasons are supposed to be: quietly, inevitably, and slightly out of schedule.People noticed it in small increments.Rain that fell through thinning ochre haze carried a faint metallic sweetness on the tongue, not unpleasant, just different enough to make adults pause mid-step and children run outside with mouths open. Garden crawlers whose lichen armor had once shifted only between warning colors now sometimes bloomed with silver flecks that caught starlight and held it for several heartbeats after the light had moved on. Children who had been born

Years passed in the manner of quiet seasons after the fissure closed. The Glass Sea settled into a mirror once more, reflecting skies that carried fewer storms and more ordinary sunrises. The silver did not vanish. It simply learned new habits of presence. It lived now in the small gestures: the way dew clung longer to certain leaves, the way certain children laughed with an echo that felt older than their bodies, the way conversations in market squares sometimes paused as though listening for a note no one could name.People rebuilt. They planted more cuttings from the seven trees. They named the new groves Continuation, Insistence, Stubborn Bloom. The names were simple because simple names are harder to forget. In New Cotonou the rooftop gardens grew thicker lattices, woven with filaments that glowed softly on moonless nights. Children still slept under those lattices. They still dreamed of vast dark mouths, but the mouths in the dreams now wore expressions of mild confusion, as tho

On the morning of the one thousand and first day since the whisper first spoke, the sky over New Cotonou turned the exact shade of polished bone. Not white. Not gray. Something between, something that remembered being alive and then decided against it. The light that fell through this sky was thin, careful, as though afraid of touching anything too firmly. People stepped outside and felt the air press against their skin with the politeness of a stranger who has come to collect a debt.No one panicked. Panic requires energy, and energy had become a currency everyone was learning to ration.Instead they moved with the deliberate slowness of people who have practiced refusal so long it has become muscle memory. They walked to their groves. They touched the trunks of silver trees. They pressed palms to bark and waited for the familiar thrum. Most mornings the thrum still answered. This morning it answered more quietly, more distant, like a voice calling from the far side of a very large r