Life in Ruins

The city was a wasteland, its towering structures now crumbled and hollow. Twisted steel beams jutted out from the ground like skeletal fingers, and the streets were cracked and overgrown with weeds, reclaiming what once belonged to nature. There were no signs of the world that had once thrived here—no bustling markets, no hum of machines, no chatter of people. Silence hung heavy in the air, broken only by the wind howling through the ruins.

The nomads moved cautiously through the streets, their clothes ragged and faces hardened by years of struggle. They had no homes, no security, only the promise of survival in a world that had turned its back on them. Humanity had plunged into a second dark age after wars, disease, and collapse left nations in ruins. The great cities of old, once symbols of human ingenuity and progress, were now nothing more than tombs filled with echoes of the past.

Survival was everything. The weak had long been lost to hunger, violence, or the unforgiving elements. Only the strong, or the cunning, endured. Tribes formed and dissolved as quickly as alliances were made and broken, each one a fragile lifeline in a world where trust could be as dangerous as a blade.

Among the nomads, stories still circulated, whispered around fires at night—of a time before the fall, when technology ruled and life was easier. But to the survivors, these tales felt like distant myths, dreams from a different world. No one knew if or when humanity would rise again, or if it even could. For now, survival was all that mattered. Each day was a battle for food, for water, for the faint hope that tomorrow might be a little less brutal than today.

In this shattered world, the future was not a promise but a distant, unreachable horizon. Only in some far-off time—if the flames of knowledge could somehow be rekindled—would humanity have any hope of climbing from the ashes. But that was not a concern for the nomads. For them, the only truth was the present: a life lived in the ruins of the past, clawing for a future that seemed all but lost.