The Roar and the Ruin
Chapter 1 (Part-B): The Eerie Silence
After the roars subsided, a new, more profound terror settled upon the land: the silence. It was not the restful quiet of a winter morning, but a heavy, echoing void that swallowed every distant cry and muffled every beat of our wings. For weeks, the sun remained a pale, indistinct disc behind a veil of perpetual dust, casting a pallid, unearthly light upon a broken world. The cold bit deeper than any winter Mitthu's parents had ever known, a chilling embrace from a wounded planet.
"The world smelled different then, my dears," Mitthu murmured, a shiver running through its feathers, though the memory was secondhand. "Like burned rock and forgotten things. The wind carried not the scent of rain or blossoming fields, but a dry, metallic tang that made our throats ache."
We, the scattered survivors of the winged tribes, began to drift back, drawn by an ancestral pull to assess the damage. From our aerial vantage, the true scale of the devastation became horrifyingly clear. The magnificent concrete nests of Man, once teeming with life, were now hollowed-out tombs. Some were flattened into vast, circular scars, others stood as jagged teeth against the bruised sky, their innards exposed, twisted metal bones protruding from shattered flesh. The black ribbons they called roads were cracked and choked with debris, their elaborate networks now senseless tangles leading nowhere.
The most striking change, however, was the absence. The ceaseless, irritating clamor of human voices was gone. Their metal beasts no longer roared. The pulsing, artificial light that had once stolen the stars from our view was extinguished, leaving only the dull, reflected glow of distant fires or the stark, grey outlines of ruin. It was as if the Earth had coughed them out, leaving behind only the shells of their ambition.
Mitthu remembered its parents recounting how they would circle for hours, searching for any sign of the teeming life that had once dominated the ground. Sometimes, a flicker of movement, a desperate, hunched figure, would emerge from the rubble, only to disappear back into the shadows. These were not the vibrant, self-assured beings they had once been, but ghosts, clinging to the broken fragments of their world. The Old Watchers knew then, with a chilling certainty, that the humans had paid a terrible price for their last, furious fit of rage. The silence, profound and enduring, was their penance.