The World's End

*The year was 4026, and the world no longer belonged to those who walked upon it. High above the ruined bones of once-great nations, colossal structures known as Spires hovered in silent dominion—monuments of wealth and absolute control, each bearing the name of a city long erased from the earth below. Where oceans once shimmered and skylines once reached proudly toward the heavens, there was now only ash, fractured stone, and the ghosts of history buried beneath layers of engineered oblivion. The sky itself had become a symbol of division—clear and radiant above the Spires, yet dim and choked below, as if even light had chosen a side.* *Within these floating empires lived the elite—the architects of this new order—wrapped in excess so vast it bordered on the surreal. They dined beneath artificial suns, walked gardens grown in defiance of nature, and watched the world beneath them not with guilt, but with detached amusement. Far below their polished halls, hidden within the damp and rusting arteries of the Spires, existed the other half—the forgotten. Chained within the suffocating dark of sewer chambers, they were reduced to survival in its most brutal form, fed scraps unfit for life, their suffering twisted into spectacle for the indulgence of those above. In this fractured future, humanity had not been united by progress… but divided by it, sharpened into a blade where one half ruled the sky, and the other was buried beneath it.*