The black rock was sharp-edged, hot, and hard as corundum; it seemed not merely alien but impervious to life. Yet on the southern face of almost every rock the lichens grew, yellow, rusty-brown, yellow-green, like...

There is a low mist in the woods—It is a good day to study lichens.

Here grew willows and alders, their trunks twisted like giants’ sinews. Around them bark lichen bloomed blue-white in the darkness. It felt like a good place, where there was old magic.

One could speculate that lichens would be among the last inhabitants to succumb on a dying earth at some distant point in the future.