Elise Manning walked out onto the deck of the cruise ship, tugging her coat closed around her. It was a brilliant Antarctic morning; Elise was glad she’d come on this cruise. She’d wanted to take a vacation - how many people could brag about visiting Antarctica’s coast for theirs? It was the only exotic place left, really.

Glancing at the icy, rugged coast, Elise smiled. She bent down for a second to polish the lenses of her binoculars, then looked back out at the continent before her.

It was green.

Startled, Elise fumbled for the binoculars, barely able to focus them with her trembling hands. What had been the stark, frozen coastline of the world’s last continent was now a lush, verdant land, dominated over all by one giant … tree.

Elise lowered her binoculars, but she could still see it clearly; the tree was massive. Roots ran aboveground, the size of mountain ranges. In the distance, an immense trunk rose to the sky. Looking overhead, Elise could see huge branches spreading out over the land, impossibly far above. Something sparkled amid those distant branches; still trembling, Elise raised her binoculars once more.

It was a waterfall.

The branches were covered not in leaves but in mountains, seas, rivers… Some of that water trickled over the edges of branches, to fall to places below. Those waterfalls look like tiny trickles, thought the astonished woman, but if I’m seeing this right, they’re far higher than any mountain… What am I seeing? How am I seeing this?

Birds shrieked nearby; a wave rocked the boat. Elise stumbled. Clutching the railing, looking out toward the coast again, she saw that it was icy again.

She never mentioned the vision to anyone. She certainly never told anyone that, for the rest of the trip, the ghostly image of an impossible tree hung over the land.