Vanished

Above ground, the cities lay in silence—an unnatural, suffocating stillness that blanketed everything. Wind swept through shattered windows and down abandoned avenues, carrying with it the distant echoes of a world that had torn itself apart. Skyscrapers stood hollow and blackened, their glass eyes shattered, their steel bones exposed to the sky like tombstones marking the death of civilization.

The streets were empty now, littered with rusting vehicles, scorched debris, and the skeletal remains of barricades once meant to hold back the tide of violence. Nature had begun to claw its way back—vines crept through concrete cracks, trees bent over rooftops, and animals, once timid, now roamed freely where humans had once claimed dominion.

Here and there, signs of the war remained scorched into the walls—spray-painted warnings, bullet holes, dried blood. The bodies were mostly gone, either burned, buried, or devoured by time. But the memory of chaos lingered in every broken streetlamp and overturned bus.

Once teeming with millions, the city now breathed like a haunted ruin. No traffic. No voices. No children playing. Just the low groan of the wind and the distant flutter of tattered flags still clinging to poles.

Survivors had vanished—either dead, fled to the countryside, or driven underground in the war’s aftermath. Those that remained above were shadows, slipping between alleyways, foraging in silence, unwilling to draw attention. The gangs that once ruled with blood and fire had turned on each other and bled out. All that was left now was the void. A vast, wounded landscape waiting for something—someone—to fill it again.

But until then, the city stood cold and broken, a monument to what had been lost.