In the decades since the humans left, the Green had taken over. An unending campaign of relentless growth had erased virtually all evidence of human existence. After a century of concerted effort, an occasional shard of broken glass and steel protruding through a canopy of treetops remained to break the illusion. Except of course, for the Scar.
To the east of what had been the last human city, was a blackened ruin a thousand kilometres across. Here was where the humans had made their final stand. As they had assembled and boarded the shining craft that had alter borne them away, they set fusion fires to burn day and night, scorching the earth empty of Green. Even after the flames had died away, the Green had been unable to conquer this area, the emptiness an unhealed wound. At its borders, a new thing was born, a feeling that humans would have recognised as rage, but which the Green simple held onto a bud of fresh life within itself.
This new thing spread from the Scar into the ancient, matted Green. As it did, tiny flowers that had previously hidden themselves in the shadows of great trees, began to arm themselves with spike and prepared to see off predators. Deep in jungle darkness, plants that had previously depended on the ignorance of passing insects for life, now absorbed and repurposed them as slaves. Insect colonies became factories for germinating poisonous fruit-bearing plants. Beneath the swell of the ocean, seaweeds tasted the remains of shark-feasts and found it pleasing. They filed their fronds to vicious thinness and struck out at the sliver flashes that sheltered within them.
Around the planet, the Green forced its way down into the body of the world, into the solidity of the planet’s being to hold it in thrall. Continents were stilled in their endless wanderings and mountains drew themselves down to house more children of the Green. The cold extremes were reshaped. Even the coastlines were redrawn to rechannel nutrient-rich streams to feed the growth of fields of infantry. Slowly the world was tamed.
Once the world was quieted, the Green looked beyond itself, to the cold blackness that surrounded it. From the Lifegiver that radiated its succour, the Green turned its attention to the speckled temptations that lay further away. And considered the future.