Dust always blows by. It drifts across the cracked pavement, settling gently, almost politely, onto everything that stands still too long. Out here, everything eventually succumbs to the dust—the rusted cars, the skeletal remains of abandoned buildings, even the hollow eyes of those who've lingered too long in one place.
The world hadn't ended with a bang as so many had predicted. There was no single catastrophic event that people could point to and say, "That's when it all fell apart." Instead, civilization had unraveled gradually, a tapestry coming loose thread by thread—climate disasters, resource wars, pandemics, economic collapse. Each crisis alone might have been survivable, but together they formed an avalanche that buried the old world beneath layers of chaos and desperation.
A decade later, dust had become the most honest historian of humanity's decline. It recorded the absence of care, the abandonment of hope, the slow surrender to entropy. In the places where people once bustled a