The world is drowning in green. Thick, verdant carpets of trailing vines cover everything, transforming the landscape into a series of rounded mounds, whose original forms I can only guess at. This green funeral shroud covers the bones of what was once a major city. I’ve torn the vines away in places, ripped them apart and tossed them away to reveal what lies beneath. Cars and trucks, signs and pylons, whole buildings enveloped in green, crushed and decaying under its onslaught. The ghosts mutter in confusion.

It’s beautiful. Look at all the green!

It’s horrible. It’s destroyed everything. There’s nothing left.

Look! Look what it’s done! It’s finally managed it! It’s eaten everything!

The ghosts respond to what I see, but they don’t seem to be able to remember much. They don’t realize that in most places I’ve passed through, the devouring vine has itself been devoured. That these lands were saved and destroyed in equal measure. That this verdant, barren city lies at the heart of one of the strangling vine’s last bastions.

I’m tempted to stay here, tearing the vines away until I slowly uncover the buried city, like some kind of strange archeologist digging through desert sands for lost artifacts of dead civilizations. Lush and green as the ruined city is, it has become its own sort of desert: nothing can grow here that isn’t quickly smothered by broad leaves and clinging tendrils. And there must certainly be artifacts of humanity left in the smothered buildings, partially sheltered from the elements even as they were slowly crushed.

The vines are relentless, swift and unsleeping, but so am I. I could tear them away as fast as they grew, return their stolen biomass to the soil. I could pull them up by their massive roots. I could travel to fetch seeds, cuttings, saplings, whatever it took to replant this place with something other than these hungry, strangling vines. And with the new forest I grew, a host of animals would appear. Old ones that lived here before the vines. New ones that have arrived since, in the strangeness following the end of the world. I could spend decades here, trying to rebuild this one fragment of a destroyed ecosystem. Of a destroyed world. A human lifetime, spent trying to fix just one of humanity’s myriad mistakes.

But there’s no reason to. No one is coming to reclaim this lost city. Whether the vines are cleared in a decade or a millennium, it makes no difference to anyone. And they will be cleared eventually. Nature is opportunistic, and nothing is wasted, certainly not millions of tons of biomass. Without humans around to disrupt it, the ecosystem is recovering. The vine barrens are gradually being reclaimed. This forgotten city, with its cracked pavement and crushed and hidden buildings, will be reclaimed as well. But not by me.

Instead, I continue my journey south. I am searching for cities drowned in water, not weeds. Somewhere to the south, near or far, is the new shore, an undiscovered coastline waiting to be remapped.