Aurora Seed Vault

We go down where the mountain keeps its breath, past steel doors that close like eyelids in a blizzard, past shelves of sleeping kernels, small galaxies sealed in glass.

Above, the sky is a slow river of green, the aurora combing the dark with lighted fingers; below, the compressors hum a long note that makes the ribs remember home.

Each seed carries a map in miniature, rivers no one has seen, tongues not yet spoken, numbered in a ledger, in a silence that trusts a thaw to be its language.

When we climb back out, snow takes our footprints and the cold is crisp as an apple that hasn't existed, the sun a coin warming in a glove, and the future a field with its gates unlatched.