I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air for I am sorry that I have made them. I will send rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights, and every living thing that I have made I will blot out from the face of the ground. And after seven days the waters of the flood came upon the earth. On that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened. And rain fell upon the earth forty days and forty nights. The ark floated on the face of the waters, and all flesh died that moved upon the earth. Birds, cattle, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm upon the earth, and every man. Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark. Then he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters had subsided from the face of the ground. Then he waited another seven days, and sent forth the dove, and she did not return to him any more."
Where did the bird land? Or maybe it weakened and was swallowed by the waters, no one could know. So the people waited for her return, and waited and grew tired of waiting. They forgot they had released the bird, even forgot there was a bird and a world sunken under water. They forgot where they had come from, how long they had been there, and where they were going so long ago that the animals have turned to stone. The bird I saw, I can't even remember where or when, it was so long ago. Perhaps it was a dream. Maybe you and I and the fish exist only in the memory of a person who is gone. Maybe no one really exists and it is only raining outside. Maybe the bird never existed at all." -From Mamoru Oshii's 'Angel's egg'.
Day 1
Overlooking the cityscape before him, his ring glittering at its usual place on the long fingers he was using to secure his position, holding on to the edge of the hatch he'd climbed through, the lone wanderer found himself wondering if this was one of those rare moments where he came close to catching a glimpse of how the sight in front of his eyes would appear to most people -
The sight of spires and no sound was a wordless oxymoron deserved of at least the vague ghost of a passing shiver, even – or especially – from a scion of an advanced civilization.
He had not spent his earliest years in such a city, but he'd been taken to study in one at the age of eight, and while the citadel of the Time Lords was never a place that could have been described as loud or bustling, the difference between a place where living was happening slowly and reverently, and one where nothing lived at all was still remarkable.
He supposed that for someone who was less used to sights and places like this, the silence would have been oppressive or majestic – To him, it was, by now, a fairly familiar phenomenon, the way the lack of any other sounds exaggerated awareness of slight noises he might otherwise barely perceive, chiefly, those he was personally the cause of, his footfalls, the layers of his clothing moving over each other or scraping against his surroundings in close quarters, his breathing and the other various sounds of living, and any littlest ambient sound too slight, or too far away, to be assigned clear interpretations – On the surface, at least, there was the wind, and possibly the occasional gerbil – but even before coming here, he'd been aware that the structures extended at the very least as far into the ground as above it, and after some days of investigation, he'd come to conclude that the towers were merely the tips of the iceberg, while the enormous underground complex was, in fact, where most of the city – and most of its long history – waited to be discovered.