The air in the Library of Echoes was dense with the scent of decaying books. For centuries, the repository had been untouched by human hands, sealed in glass domes that preserved the remnants of the world before the Collapse. Jera, a researcher from Sector 13, carefully pulled the ancient tome from its resting place, its leather-bound cover cracking under her gloves. The title, written in faded in...

By the time I’m almost finished organising the books my arms feel like they’re about to fall off. Why do we even have libraries anymore? Who bothers with pleasantries such as reading in these times?

I pick up the last book in the pile, it’s titled “Cats: A Guide Our Furry Friends”. What on earth is a cat? I open the and read the first page, it says they’re small, furry animals that make great pet...

August 12, 4026

We don’t have cats. At least… I think? I picked up this book about them when I was younger and I was hooked. The fluffy tails, big eyes, claws, etc. I never realized that they were real and not fiction until my mom pulled out a picture of my grandma with one. I wish i lived in a time with them.

Do you realize how worshipped they were? They were seen as gods! I think I jus...

In the year 2158, when the air was filtered through massive domes and the soil had long turned to dust, Camus sat in his cubicle, scrolling through ancient archives on his screen. It was his daily assignment: cataloging irrelevant relics from the pre-Sterile Age. The task was monotonous, but he preferred it over the alternative—poking through soil samples in search of non-existent “bio-life.”

Tod...

‘Bread… milk… soup…’

Chrissy went over the groceries in her head a million times, practically engraving the list in her neurons.

Her mother was strict about these kinds of things. She always wanted this specific food list, nothing more, nothing less. The woman even went as far as giving Chrissy only the exact amount of Knuts down to the tax coin, having memorized it herself. So if Chrissy, in th...

Prologue

In the dimly lit streets of London, an unsettling silence had descended upon the city, blanketing it like a thick fog that shrouded the bustling metropolis in an otherworldly veil. The once-vibrant cacophony of voices, laughter, and the rhythmic clip-clop of horse-drawn carriages had been reduced to a distant memory, replaced by the ghostly whispers of the wind as it wove its way through...

What could this remarkable creature be? I’ve never seen something quite like it. It reminds me of the little stuffed toys I’ve seen, what were they called? Teddies or something like that?

I wonder how large these creatures got. With a fierce face, I imagine it had to have been massive, at the very least the size of my motorbike.

It says here that they were kept as pets. I can’t imagine having s...

My school project was due, another stupid assignment about the old world. The white haired librarian had suggested I try the back archives.

I trudged up the metal stairs of the library, my boots clanging on every step. At the top was a small room with some historic wooden bookcases, very different to the iron ones that housed the main book selection. A rug covered the floor in the middle of the r...

Julie and Brandon had told me about these once. Non-human animals, creatures that were purely something else and came in all sorts of shapes and sizes. They were nothing like I had imagined they’d be.

I was currently staring at what was most likely one of the oldest prehybridization records in the world. I had been sifting through an old, forgotten city deep in a mountain when I found it.

The b...

Cat

What’s that

matter of fact

cat was all that

A pet and a pat

Whiskers...