illphated
The Last Seagull of Mars
by illphated.com
In the crimson dusk of Mars, where twin shadows of shattered moons stretched across a terraformed sky, a lone seagull stood sentinel over the neon-lit city of New Ares.
He had no name—not in the way we understand them—but he had memory. Not just his own, but that of Earth’s coasts, encoded in his bloodline. Crashing waves, salt on feathers, the primal scream of gulls over forgotten oceans. Those oceans were long gone now. Earth had drowned in its own progress, and Mars had risen—not as a savior, but as a neon exile for the remnants of human ambition.
Beneath him sprawled the city—humming, twitching, and pulsing in hues of violet, electric cyan, and soft radioactive pink. Spires stabbed into the sky like broken antennae, scraping signals from a universe too busy to care. Airships glided between towers like lazy sharks, their trails dissolving into the haze of vaporwave hues that lit up the artificial atmosphere.
No one in the city looked up anymore. Not at the stars. Not at the sky. Not at him.
But he watched.
He remembered when they brought him here, a curiosity from Earth’s last biodome. “Symbol of resilience,” they called him. The last gull. A living antique perched in a Martian petting zoo. But one day, the zoo fell silent. People stopped coming. The gates rusted. And he flew—free, wild, forgotten.
Now, from the cliffs above District 9, he kept watch over a city that had forgotten the sea. He was their ghost. Their conscience. Their warning.
Because in his bones, the seagull knew something no algorithm could compute:
All civilizations crash like waves.
And only some things fly above the tide.
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