In the second decade of the twenty-first century, as the earth began to warm and the seas to rise, something woke from sleep. At first it was odd incidents here and there, but by the time that Elsa was a student at university, the Great Change was well underway. The poetically inclined called it the Return of Magic, and speculated that it was the world, Mother Earth, waking up to confront her unruly children. In any case, the manifestations became ever more spectacular. As usual the tales from the east were more extravagant; a field biologist of her acquaintance, returning from fieldwork in the resurgent forest of the Chernobyl dead zone, claimed to have seen Baba Yaga and her daughters, and repeated rumors of shambling things spotted in the mist beyond the barbed wire lining the interdicted shores of the river running through Chelyabinsk.
Of course, those things were no worse, in their way, than the horrors already documented in the medical literature, long before the Change showed itself.
E. P. Beaumont 
Wow! Environmental dystopians/post-apocalyptics are pretty big right now. Sounds like yours will be leading the pack. Very well-written.
I absolutely love the narrative voice here. It’s fluid and just works. Very wonderful. Thanks for sharing.
I’m in love with the term the poetically inclined. Fantastic excerpt.
Love how you are taking today’s reality, giving it a twist and creating something plausible but not likely (maybe) and then to carry on with how that new world order would be organized.
Terrific combination of current events and fantasy, and I love the possibility of Mother Earth driving it all. Very nice six.
More and more intriguing! Can’t wait to see how this unfolds!
So fascinating and dense. This is going to be amazing.
This is a lot of world-building in a small amount of words. But it works perfectly. You’ve given a world history very succinctly I love the details and references—especially the Baba Yaga one.
Love the world-building taking off from today’s environmental problems.
A fun level of speculation about the world. You use your details with so much skill it’s makes your world come to life in my mind fully formed.
Great piece of world building and mood-setting. Baba Yaga and shambling things … nice and creepy.