Venti_______Simp
What Aroan called 'the world' was a wound that never closed, screaming beneath its own skin.
The era before the collapse, the one whispered about in folklore, had never promised a happy ending. It was a time devoid of boundaries, utterly lacking in pity. The concept of negotiation to avert violent conflict-to save one's life through words-was an obsolete, forgotten language. Here, in the present, violence was the only dialect understood, the answer breathed with every stale gasp of air.
Civilization did not fall in a single moment-it spoiled slowly, eaten alive by its own sins, until its final screams blended into the noise of the invasion.
The very atmosphere was diseased, thick and heavy, choking the lungs with a wet, feral musk of cornered wolves, the damp, grave-soil reek of the shambling dead, the razor-sharp, metallic tang of unknown apex predators, and the acrid, burning sulfurous exhaust spewed by the Orgs as they ripped through cityscapes like festering, open wounds. Looming over this terrestrial nightmare was the most unsettling presence: the Aliens. They moved among the ruins wearing humanity like a thin, unnervingly flawless mask; their skin possessed an almost synthetic smoothness, and their eyes were vast, terrifying voids, empty of any recognizable spark of life or soul.