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.