The volcano went silent three hundred years ago. The ash fields are long gone, swallowed by pioneer moss and scrub willow. Where sulfur once choked the air, a cathedral of old-growth firs now stands. You would never know, walking beneath them, that anything had burned.
Unless you dig down. Unless you looked at the soil layers, or noticed the strange ring of bare stone where nothing would grow, or asked why the elk moved in herds through certain valleys but never certain others.
Catastrophe leaves marks. So does healing. Both are gifts to the world-builder willing to pay attention.
This issue is about ecological succession which is the process by which life reclaims land after devastation and how you can use it to make your fictional world feel like it has a past, as well as a future.
