Five hundred years is a very, very long time.
If you stood perfectly still and watched the world for five hundred years, you would see the Earth change in ways that felt like pure magic. You would see tiny, fragile acorns grow into massive oak trees that touched the clouds. You would see rivers slowly carve deep, beautiful canyons into solid rock. You would watch millions of seasons dance by—a dizzying, wonderful blur of white snow, bright spring blooms, warm summer sun, and falling orange leaves.
For the people of Earth, the dark days of the war were nothing but a distant story. It was an old fairy tale that mothers told their children before bed. They told stories about a time when the sky was a bruised, sick purple, and the air was too poisonous to breathe. They whispered about evil men who lived in metal towers and giant, scary iron monsters that roamed the wastelands.
