The sky was turning bronze.
Jinjing-Yu sat cross-legged atop a crumbling library roof, her journal open across her thighs. A breeze whispered through the broken stone arches around her, tugging gently at the edges of yellowed pages. Below, the skeleton of a city slumbered — half-reclaimed by vines and quiet wind, where glass once sang and power once hummed.
She had climbed here after a long day of searching through the library's flooded lower floors. Most of it had collapsed into itself decades ago, but in the highest stacks she had found something unexpected: a small, weather-stained plaque. Its engraved letters were nearly gone, but the words still clung to the metal like a fading memory:
“Knowledge Belongs to All Who Seek It.”
It wasn’t much. Not a blueprint or a relic. Just a phrase. But it stuck to her thoughts like pollen.
She looked out toward the ruins as golden light pooled in the streets below. She looked down to her lap, to the book she had made herself. Bound in leather and filled with scavenged paper and fabric scraps to serve as its pages.
She turned to a blank page and slowly uncapped the mechanical pencil she'd found seasons ago in the desk of a long-dead office worker.
Then she began to write.
“Whispers of the Old Ones”
They carved their world in stone and steel,
with hands like ours, yet hearts concealed.
They lit the night with humming light,
and vanished softly out of sight.
I walk through halls they left behind,
each ruin shaped to hold their mind.
The echoes hum in rust and glass—
a thousand voices that couldn’t last.
Did they speak to stars and sky?
Or weep in silence, asking why?
Did joy run deep or burn and fade
beneath the towers that they made?
I touch the keys, the silent screen—
a ghost of something once routine.
A story waits in every wall,
but none remain who knew it all.
And still I come, and still I stay,
where human hands have slipped away.
I feel their wonder in the air—
a vanished world that’s still somewhere.
Perhaps they dreamed a world like this,
of open skies, of calm and bliss.
Perhaps their end was not the fall,
but just a passing through it all.
And so I return, and softly tread,
where ancient souls once wept and bled.
Their secrets sleep beneath the stone—
but in their silence, I have grown.
When she finished, she sat back and stared across the skyline. The towers were silent now, but not empty.
A chill breeze drifted through the gaps in the stone. She closed the journal, held it to her chest, and closed her eyes for a while.
Not to sleep.
Just to feel.
Just to remember them.
The ones who built this world… and the silence they left behind.
