W A N D E R
900 ABY
It could have been a whisper on the wind.
The hustle and bustle of the average person walking up and down, over and across, the streets on their way to, or from, wherever they needed to be filled the air with a certain ambiance. It was like the sludge one pictured whenever the word pollution was vaguely used, a toxic waste that stank as much as it was disgusting to look at. Languid footfalls that carried the same passion of an irritating cough that just wouldn't go away, and their faces - their faces were the most infuriating of it all. So unhappy with the state of their lives but with none of the fervor to do anything about it, paired with their whispered of complacent discontent. Manufactured disgust at a governance and a tentacled beast of an economy that had them played like little marionettes with every one of their stringed pulled at by one of its viscid tendrils.
All of it wiped away by the bright, white-hot, flash of raw heat that burned away at the fetid scene.
Concussive force pushed the air forcefully outwards from a street corner, chunks of the ground ripped up in chunks like scabs flung from a festering wound hurled through the air and tore through bodies with such force that the bits of them not struck were separated as if by fine wires. A great whistling followed the loudest thunderclap any of them had ever heard as it was all pulled back in again by the vacuum created by the sudden evacuation of air and mass that had been forced away just moments before, leaving only skeletal remains of buildings that lined the street that had been busy just minutes ago. Then, just as suddenly as the abrupt interruption had arrived, there was silence.
"Like the ending of a song."
She'd been walking away for a while now, long before the chaos had been ushered in, and was far enough away that it'd been only a faint warmth on her back and a loud crack in the air to her by then. A financial district, or something of the sort, filled with the sorts of people that were more than happy to invest their wealth into preying upon the planet's less fortunate - unaware that their final deposits had been their very lives into the ground beneath their feet, left behind as mere shadows in charred duracrete. Steadily shrill screams filled the air and she felt her lips tug back into an impish grin.
To her their panic was the sound of birds flying up at once - music to her ears.