Welcome To The Age Of Birds

A speculative fiction project by @real-sparrowboy Updates whenever I make more

[the-ornizoic-era]

DIRECTORY

Tag System

Logs - main entries detailing the chronology of the ornizoic era

Answers - replies to any inbox questions, may or may not be related to the project itself

Extras - content related to the project that doesn’t fit into the logs themselves

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PREHISTORY

0: Phoenix

[the-ornizoic-era]

0: Phoenix

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In Ancient Greek mythology, the Phoenix is a legendary bird whose lifespan stretches into eternity. When it dies, it bursts into an extravagant bundle of dancing flames, leaving nothing but ash behind. And from that ash, the Phoenix rises once again, carrying on after its predecessor for millennia to come. Dying all the time, but it never stops living.

It has been 20,000 years since the Cenozoic extinction event.

Homo Sapiens, the tall apes, became the rulers of the world after the turn of the Holocene. From their original lands in Africa, they expanded north into Eurasia, marching onward to the far east and crossing land bridges into the Americas. They crafted tools, learned to wield the flame, and planted the seeds for grand civilizations.

Over countless millennia, they continued to grow more and more powerful, each coming generation advancing faster than the one before. But with this power they became dangerous—not just to the world around them, but to themselves. They tore down forests that had stood for centuries and built their homes out of the wood. They hunted entire species to extinction to feed their clans. They destroyed mountains to extract the precious stones within. They burned the remains of organisms long dead to power their ever-growing population centers.

All the suffering they inflicted they seemed to prosper off of. But it wouldn’t last for long.

For the apes were an unfortunately near-sighted species, their leaders refused to realize that this endless greed would become their own undoing. They had disrupted the delicate balance of their world, and every animal would suffer the fallout to come.

And the tall apes had forgotten that they too were animals.

When it came time for the world to end, it did not come with a flash or a bang.

It did not come with a grand burst of flames. It did not come with a towering wall of water. It did not come with a massive ball of fire crashing into the earth, like what had happened to the dinosaurs. It didn’t come with a catastrophic nuclear war either—even the apes feared themselves too much to wreak that kind of destruction.

The end of the world was slow and painful. It was a series of one bad decision after another. It was a chain reaction of carelessness and pride.

It was the slow rising of seas, the warming of the air, and the burning of forests.

It was entirely preventable.

This is a map the new world, 20,000 years after last one ended. Like the legendary phoenix from ape myths, the force of life is suspended in an endless cycle of rebirth. In the wake of destruction, the ashes of the old are swept up and turned into something new, filling the empty space their predecessors left behind.