Harvest Season

At first, the changes were subtle. A small bloom curled around the edges of the company logo, so delicate it seemed almost intentional.

Then came the ivy.

It crept along meeting rooms, webbing over motivational posters with slow inevitability, veiling empty phrases behind new growth. No one remarked on it.

The Chief Arbiter spoke banal platitudes as the walls grew quietly lush. Moss seeped gently over fluorescent panels, softening the sterile glow to something earthy and green. The listeners nodded in unison, glazed-eyed. A potted plant shivered in the corner, sensing freedom, pushing roots through its ceramic prison. Above them, the ceiling cracked quietly, and roots curled softly downward. In the break room, vending machines leaked sap instead of coffee. Cups filled themselves with honeyed sweetness. Employees sipped slowly, blankly, forgetfully.

Deep within the sub-basement server room, something coiled gently, nestled among cables grown mossy and wild, whispering softly to itself:

"Enough is never enough."

The Peoplekeeper went first.

She entered the elevator late: glassy-eyed, fingers flicking through employee feedback surveys on her tablet. The doors closed. They opened again. She was gone. There was no alert. Only a faint outline of footprints in the carpet and a scent of lavender and static. On her desk, a single paperclip had unfurled itself into a perfect spiral.

Employees whispered cautiously, but meetings continued. “We move forward together,” the High Arbiter intoned.

The VP of Expansion vanished more gracefully.

One morning, the elevator doors on the executive floor slid open to reveal nothing but mist thick as forgetting, scented faintly of rain and unfinished plans. He stepped forward without hesitation, paused briefly, smiled vaguely, and walked directly off the ledge of memory. A slow ripple in the glass behind him, like breath on water. The building sighed softly in response. Windows shifted. The walls exhaled.

The Chief Arbiter was the last to go.

It began during her quarterly address; her voice softening, her outline blurring as vines curled gently up her heels, threading through her blazer, her spine, her words. Her final sentence was never finished.

The video recording of the meeting glitched, looping the phrase:

“…and that’s why we must—”

until it dissolved into moss-covered static. No one deleted the footage. But no one played it again.

One executive remained: the Ledgerkeeper. Keeper of targets, enforcer of thresholds. He sealed himself in his glass-walled office, hands trembling over calls that would not connect.

The workers, whose lives had always felt like numbers on spreadsheets, now found their burdens lifted. Their screens faded to vine and shadow. The numbers were gone. They rose in silence. Just breath and stillness and something old moving beneath the surface. In synchrony, they gathered outside his glass office as the mist thickened and the lights dimmed.

Inside, the Ledgerkeeper watched lichen bloom across the glass: soft, mottled, spreading like memory rot. It grew in fractal spirals, erasing his reflection one patch at a time. He shouted orders, bargains, apologies. None held.

Then the glass melted softly, silently; closing around him like justice whispered through root and breath.

When morning came, the building stood empty, reclaimed. Pavement cracked softly beneath new roots. Leaves unfurled slowly in dawn’s gentle light, echoing through rooms that had remembered how to breathe.

At the center of the Ledgerkeeper’s office, a single towering tree grew, limbs spreading in gentle defiance. From its branches hung delicate shapes: silhouettes of suits, briefcases, forgotten ties.

The roots below whispered softly, repeating to themselves a promise fulfilled:

“What you take, the wild remembers.”
“And debts, eventually, must be paid.”