It was a crisp cold day down in London. The weather was as foggy and dour as always, and the air reeked of sewage and old cobblestones. The one thing that made this day not like any other dour day in London, was that not a single building was standing. As far as the eye could see, metal bars and chunks of brick littered the streets. Not a single soul was in sight either - the terrain was far too dangerous to make traversing the remains advisable.

The land was cracked and charred, with large, jagged edges blocking the sky - not that the sky itself was worth looking at, ash and dust conspiring to block out the sun and any remaining piece of the blue sky that could be seen. The air was rank, covered with smoke and debris, barely breathable to most and borderline toxic in some areas. The only signs of civilization laid in smoothed out metal bunkers beckoning all underground, where most of the population stayed nowadays. It truly was the end of the old world order as everyone once knew it.

Everyone brave enough to breach the surface could see for themselves what had caused this. How could they not, when they broke through the skies and covered entire districts with naught but their legs alone.

To call these beings giants would be to call an ant a tyrannosaurus rex. Living mountains would be a better descriptor for the mounds of pink and brown skin that dominated the landscape and blocked the horizon, blanketing the world in their eternal shadows. Monstrous footprints covered the land, indenting the soil deep, creating valleys with every footfall, compressing and squeezing the surrounding stone with overwhelming pressure to the point that it practically seemed to mold like putty. The ground seemed to never be stable, and practically shifted to and fro, molding to their steps like putty. Thus far, no one had really been able to see beyond their toes, their stature alone dwarfing many of the high rises in their heyday, let alone the ruins that they were now.

They were gods to the people that lived on the surface, now forced deep underground in order to survive. But more importantly, they were still their children.

No one knew quite how it happened. One moment, it was an average day like any other, where boys would be playing tackle football in the park and aggressively daring one another to eat the nearest caterpillar, and girls would be playing hopscotch and aggressively daring one, their older siblings either trying to control the madness or egging it on, and their parents watched on bemusedly in reminiscence of their own childhoods. The next, like a wayward flap of butterfly wings, every single biological male ages 5 to 17 around the world began to grow. And grow. And grow. Larger yet larger, larger till entire cities came to be flattened by just their feet, and then larger yet more. The youngest would soon wake up to a cold, unfamiliar, barren world, completely flat and surrounded by nothing but strange imposing masses of white fluff - fluff that they would come to recognize as clouds, which would come to swirl and form all around them. The older teens, trust upon more responsibility than they ever expected to handle by themselves, could only try to help their younger siblings and friends adjust to this strange new yet familiar environment - a task made all the more onerous once they realized what had happened. While they now remained with only the clothes they were wearing, there was no food around, nothing to drink, nothing at all to protect and sustain their newly enlarged forms for long.

It wasn't completely hopeless, though. Due to the quick actions of a number of the children, who were able to evacuate themselves and others from populated areas, there were some pockets of civilization that still stood, albeit drastically crippled by the numerous blows to supply chains generated by the chaos across the world. There were some who even managed to establish a method of communication between the children and the human mites that now rested at their feet. Those lucky few who were able to make contact with their children were soon able to form a sort of truce between the two, ensuring that work would be done to feed the children and find a way for them to return to their normal stature in exchange for providing protection from any kind of threat from either themselves or others. Others would come to refer to this period of time as the New Genesis, as now, the planet belonged to the young.