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Its in its death knells now.

 

A sepsis takes and it takes what is left of this world with a slow but noticeable fervor. It changes and fights with gnashing teeth and strange disasters, all of wildfire and harsh storms and the shaking of the earth under your feet. 

 

The skies are rarely blue, instead bruised and stained with a constant layer of smog. It settles with an oily residue over pools of water. It burns holes and black flecks into the grass and meager supply of small trees and shrubs with acid rain. To hear birdsong or the trill of a cricket among the shrubs is a more rare delight now.

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It was so gradual a change, slow over years, that you realize you can no longer remember when you last saw a firefly blinking in a balmy summer evening. 

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Those on the outside are few, struggling in quaint and small settlements built out of the skeletons of abandoned suburbs and old shacks. They live simple, and unable to truly thrive, under the haze that they can trace to the dull and flashing lights in distant cities.

 

The many stay behind walls and walls of filthy concrete, their faces lit up by neon lights within overcrowded cities, cast in shadows of dystopian superstructures, where the air tastes of artificial rain and car exhaust and the steel of bullet trains moving to the next dome. 

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