Chameleon Magazine

When the storms ended, the world began again—not on an ark, but in the shattered towers of a drowned city.

The survivors were few. They built their shelters from the bones of skyscrapers, sealing the cracks with melted plastic and the sap of new vines. Among them was Nara, an engineer who remembered the time before the flood: when the seas crept upward each year, when warnings turned to silence, and when the rain finally became endless.

For months they lived by the rhythm of rebuilding. Nara led the reconstruction, mapping old satellite grids and coaxing seeds from labs now deep beneath the tide. Every dawn, she gathered her small group—farmers, scavengers, dreamers—and told them the same thing:

“Be abundant again. Let this place be reborn.”

But the people carried fear like a second heart. The sea still whispered at night, and they knew it could rise again. Even the wild creatures that returned to the land seemed to tremble at their presence. Wolves would not cross their scent. Birds circled but did not land. It was as if nature remembered what humanity had done.

One day, as Nara repaired a weather drone on the roof of an old hospital, the machine’s cracked lens caught the light. The reflection bent across the dark clouds above, scattering into color. A band of glassy hues stretched across the entire sky—a fragment of a world that had nearly forgotten beauty.

The people gathered below, staring upward. Some cried. Some laughed. Some simply fell to their knees in silence.

Nara spoke softly, her voice barely audible over the wind:

“Let this be the covenant—not between gods and men, but between what we were and what we will become.”

From then on, whenever a storm gathered, the light returned. Not always visible, but always there—projected by the drones, maintained by those who remembered. It became their vow: to live without domination, to eat without waste, to build without blindness.

Years passed. New forests swallowed old freeways. The animals no longer fled. Children grew who had never seen the ocean angry. And when they asked about the rainbow of glass, the elders would tell them:

“It’s the memory of a promise we made when the world finally forgave us.”

“The earth does not demand worship—only remembrance, and a promise not to break it twice.”