Where Siren Lake Lies

The Collapse

       What is known is that humanity once stood at the pinnacle of advancement. Cities reached the sky, technology connected every corner of the globe, and knowledge was vast and abundant, contained in endless books, libraries, and digital vaults. Then, it ended. No one knows whether it was war, climate catastrophe, a global pandemic, or something stranger—perhaps even an amalgamation of all. All that remains of that era are ruins, burned-out skeletons of cities where humanity's greatest achievements now lie buried under ash and overgrowth.

The knowledge housed in books and digital archives—everything from history to science, medicine to literature—was either destroyed in the fires of the collapse or lost to time as power grids failed and memory devices decayed. Some say there was once a way to recover this knowledge, but the means were lost as well. Humanity was plunged into a darkness deeper than mere survival.

The survivors inherited a blank slate. The collapse severed the continuity of history, and with no records to consult, people began to forget. The details of how the world worked faded into myth, then into nothingness. Words that once described concepts like "internet," "electricity," and "nation" are now strange and meaningless, used only by the elders, who themselves barely understand their meaning. Without books or a cohesive understanding of what happened, the past has become a ghost—a faint and formless presence lingering in the minds of the living.

Yet humanity is stubborn. In the midst of the wreckage, small groups have started to rebuild. Education centers, often no more than humble gatherings in the shadows of once-great structures, have formed. Here, elders share what scraps of knowledge they can recall: how to grow food, how to make simple tools, how to build shelter. Occasionally, relics of the old world are unearthed—a fragment of a book, a broken machine—and become objects of fascination and reverence.

Elders speak in stories, passing down fragmented truths and half-remembered lessons. Sometimes they describe humanity's former glory, but even their memories are unreliable. Was the old world truly real, or have these recollections been twisted by longing and regret? Some children look to the stars and wonder if the collapse was a punishment, or if it was simply inevitable—a cost of reaching too far.

Though much has been lost, there is a strange kind of hope in this new world. In the absence of answers, humanity has rediscovered curiosity. People long to uncover what was and to understand what went wrong, not to repeat it but to learn from it. These scattered education centers are the seeds of a new civilization, a humble beginning forged from the ashes of the old.

The fall of humanity erased almost everything, but it could not extinguish the will to rebuild. That, it seems, is the one thing humanity will never forget.

Her father was gone, their village burned to the ground, leaving her, her younger sister Nora, and their mother with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Grief had to take a back seat to survival. Their mother, stoic and determined, led them away from the ashes of their old life, walking for weeks until they found a settlement cobbled together from salvaged wood and rusted metal. It wasn't much, but it was safety.

In this struggling settlement, their mother worked tirelessly, sewing and trading for scraps to keep them fed. But survival in this world demanded more than one pair of hands. Lila, unwilling to let her mother shoulder everything, became just as determined. She took to painting—an art she'd learned from her father. With berries crushed into pigments and brushes made from her own hair tied to sticks, she began creating vibrant images on scraps of wood, stone, and fabric.

Her paintings caught the attention of the settlement's residents. They were crude at first, but the colors—the deep reds of berries, the soft blues of crushed flowers—brought a kind of life to a world that often felt so bleak. People began to barter for them, offering food, clothing, or other necessities in exchange for a piece of beauty. Lila poured herself into her work, finding comfort in the swirls of color and the memories of her father's hands guiding hers long ago.