A Crumbling World

The sky split open with a shriek of tortured metal. A shadow, sleek and broken, tumbled from the heavens, leaving a trail of black smoke against the bruised afternoon clouds. It spiraled downward, too fast, too sudden for salvation. The people of the remote town had only moments to look up before the inevitable came—before the earth trembled and fire bloomed like a second sun.

The wreckage burned where it fell, in the heart of the thick woods beyond the crumbling roads. Trees snapped like brittle bones, their charred remains mingling with the twisted metal and shattered glass of what had once been a passenger jet. There were no sirens in the distance, no swift rescue teams rushing to the scene. Help, if it came at all, would arrive too late.

This wasn’t the first. It wouldn’t be the last.

Once, air travel had been a marvel—swift, seamless, safe. That era was gone. The nation, rotting from the inside, had let its infrastructure decay beyond repair. Planes that should have been decommissioned years ago still took to the skies, their maintenance a cruel joke played by indifferent corporations. The men and women in the control towers were no longer the highly trained professionals they once had been. Instead, they were whoever the government could find—underqualified, overwhelmed, and watching their screens with tired, unseeing eyes.

The skies had become a graveyard, filled with metal corpses waiting to fall.

Those who still traveled by air did so with grim resignation, knowing they might not reach their destination. Each flight was a gamble, a test of fate, but what choice was left? The highways were just as dangerous, lawless and broken. The trains had long since ceased reliable operation. The world was shrinking, caging people in the ruins of their once-great nation.

And so, another plane had fallen, its fire flickering against the cold, darkening sky. The people of the town stared in silence, watching the smoke rise, waiting for the flames to die out. By tomorrow, the wreckage would be stripped by scavengers, picked clean of anything useful. The dead, if there were any left to find, would be buried beneath the rubble of a crumbling world.

And then, life would go on.