The Silence of Man: A Feathered Chronicle (Ch-1a)

Part I: The Roar and the Ruin 

Chapter 1 (Part-A): The Fire Storm and the Flight

"Children, gather close. Perch here, where the wind whispers through the skeletons of what they built. Listen. This is a story my grandmother told me, a story etched into the very feathers of our kind. It is the beginning of the Great Silence, the day the Sky Burned." Mitthu shifted on the crumbling ledge of a high-rise, ruffling a wing over a small, curious fledgling named Chirp, while Pip and Squeak nudged closer, their tiny eyes fixed on the horizon where the sun, though muted by dust, still attempted its daily climb.

My grandmother, a wise old raven, spoke of a time when the human clamor reached an unbearable crescendo. The constant buzzing beneath our nests turned into a sharper, more frantic hum. We, the dwellers of the air, felt the tremors in the earth before they saw the true danger. There were more of their metal birds in the sky then, sleek, silent predators compared to our fluttering kind, crisscrossing the blue with an urgency that spoke of deep, unseen fear.

Then came the first flash. Not the gentle, cleansing flash of a storm's lightning, but a light so utterly consuming, so blinding, that even the clouds screamed white for a fleeting moment. It erupted from the distant north, blooming into a monstrous flower of fire and smoke that reached for the heavens, far higher than any peak my ancestors had ever scaled. The heat, even from miles away, was a palpable, scorching breath that ruffled feathers and sent panic through every living thing.

"Did it hurt, Mother?" Chirp cheeped, pressing closer.

"It was a pain unlike any other, little one, not of the body, but of the very air," Mitthu replied, remembering the ancient terror passed down. "And then, the sound. The Great Roar. It tore through the sky, a thousand thunderclaps rolled into one, shaking the very bones of the world. Buildings, even their proudest towers, trembled and wept dust. Trees bowed low, and even the stones groaned."

More flashes followed, like angry stars exploding across the globe, each one accompanied by its own terrifying roar and a wave of superheated wind that flattened everything in its path. Cities, once vibrant tapestries of light and sound, turned into smoldering craters and shattered husks. The air grew thick with ash and dust, blotting out the sun and turning day into an eternal twilight.

The sky, our home, became a dangerous place. Strange, invisible currents buffeted our wings, and the very air seemed to prickle. Our flocks, once vast and orderly, scattered in frantic, chaotic flight. Mothers lost their young to the swirling winds of destruction, and the ground below offered no sanctuary, only fire and crumbling desolation. We flew, not knowing where, only away from the searing light and the crushing sound. We flew until our wings ached and our eyes burned from the smoky haze, driven by an instinct far older than Man's cities – the primal urge to survive.

The Silence of Man: A Feathered Chronicle - Introduction

The Sky's Ancient Gaze

For cycles uncounted, my kind has known the sky. We are the Old Watchers, the ones whose vantage point grants a truth often missed by those who cling to the soil. We have seen seasons bleed into one another, forests rise and fall, and the slow, relentless creep of ice across continents. But nothing, absolutely nothing, prepared us for the cacophony that preceded the Great Silence, and the silence that followed.

Before, the world thrummed with the frantic energy of Man. From my perch high above, atop the gnarled finger of a centuries-old oak, I watched their cities sprawl like cancerous growths across the land. They were hives of ceaseless motion, shimmering with artificial lights that mocked the stars. Their metal beasts roared along black ribbons, ferrying them from one hurried task to the next. The air often tasted acrid, thick with the exhalations of their countless engines, and the rivers, once clear veins of the earth, ran murky with their refuse.

They were a peculiar species, these humans. They built colossal nests of stone and glass that scraped the clouds, yet often seemed oblivious to the true sky above them. They wielded fire and metal with a dexterity that both awed and alarmed us. Their voices, a constant chatter, filled the world with a thousand different meanings we could never truly decipher, yet the underlying tone was always the same: a restless striving, an endless yearning for more. They called themselves "masters" of the Earth, and from their grand structures and ceaseless alterations of the landscape, it was hard to argue.

We, the migratory ones, carried stories from distant lands on our wings: tales of their vast, tilled fields that fed their immense numbers, of their great flying machines that challenged our dominion of the air, of the strange, invisible webs they wove that connected them across oceans. They seemed invincible, their numbers growing like a plague of locusts, their dominion absolute. We simply learned to navigate their world, finding sustenance in their discarded scraps, nesting in the nooks of their towering constructs, always with an ancient, quiet understanding that their furious energy was not the way of the wind, nor the river, nor the slow turning of the sun. It was a fever, a relentless burn.

And then, the fever broke.

Quote of the day

The Silence of Man: A Feathered Chronicle

A World Silenced. A Species Vanished. A Planet's Grinding Reset.

The Silence of Man offers a stark and poignant vision of a post-apocalyptic Earth, recounted through the ancient wisdom and keen observations of Mitthu, a long-lived bird from a lineage of migratory watchers. Unlike typical tales of human resilience, this chronicle presents a chillingly realistic demise, where humanity's self-inflicted wounds prove fatal not only for themselves but threaten to consume all life that remains.

(A short story by Deepak Garg - coming soon....)

Quote of the day - फिर नहीं बस्ते वो दिल ...

फिर नहीं बस्ते वो दिल जो एक बार उजड़ जाते हैं 

कब्र को कितना भी सजाओ कोई लौट के नहीं आता