A human soldier from a doomed futuristic civilization traverses through the fabrics of space and time to flee mankind's imminent extinction, only to stumble upon Zootopia - a diverse world unlike any other. Namely, an antiquated society filled with...
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The scorched hills beyond the horizon were buried under slow, raging sandstorms.
Everything in this world was so much quieter now.
Only the wind remained, dragging slowly, scraping waves of sand across the ruined streets. It hissed through broken windows and the exposed ribs of half-buried structures. Somewhere out there, a loose panel acted as an indolent metronome, banging and creaking against rusted metal with every shifting gust. The engines, the voices, the music—gone. All that remained was the dry rasp of dust against concrete, punctuated by the low, distant rumble of storms grinding beneath the broken skyline. The air tasted used: ash, old fuel, rust on my tongue. It smelled like hot metal and burned plastic, like the inside of a dead machine.
A place like this fundamentally changes you. At first, you cling desperately to your memories—familiar faces, voices, sounds of laughter, the scent of rain on the street. But time is relentless. You start to forget the things you should remember... and you can't stop remembering the things you should forget. The screams. The inferno. The sight of the ships descending, and the single night that erased everything that mattered. An eternity of suffering compressed into a short span, yet it feels like forever since anything was right.
There was nothing left in this world to look forward to anymore—only things to look back on. Old promises unkept. Old mistakes repeated. Old ghosts that wouldn't stay buried. Two small mounds in the sand. A father's last request. A pup's last smile. They all kept haunting me. There was a time when I believed all good things had to come to an end so that better things could come... even when those better things never seemed to come. As I stood atop a lonely hill in the wasteland, watching the sand slowly swallow what was left, I told myself there had to be something else beyond all of this—somewhere that didn't fall the way this place did.
But as seconds turned to days, days turned to months, and months turned to years, time slowly began to corrode that hope deep inside me.
For a while, I believed nothing could be worse than the day this world slipped into darkness—the day the creatures in black fell from the sky and turned everything into a nightmare. It was the day humanity won, but also the day humanity lost. All of our gains—all our accomplishments—were just losses wearing different masks. We survived. We persevered. But what reason was there to live, when the very thing that made us who we were meant to be was lost in time?
A life without purpose is its own kind of death. I thought that was the worst thing this universe could offer.
...I was wrong.
Out beyond these dead horizons, past the abandoned carriers and the silent colonies, something far worse was brewing. A new terror was rising—something moving in the dark, far stronger than the ones who started all this, hungrier than anything we'd faced so far. A force that has plagued humanity for centuries.
And if nothing is done about it, then it will be too late—for me, and for everyone else... forever.
