A millennium after a single catastrophic event erased the digital age, pre-industrial civilizations are emerging, surrounded by the crumbled ruins of the cities of the Ancients, now reclaimed by the jungle. The knowledge and history of the Ancients - once stored in books and circuits - have long vanished into dust.

In the Malayan peninsula, a feudal kingdom clings to order beneath the watchful eye of the Orthodoxy, a powerful religious authority that forbids all but the sanctioned version of creation: that the Purge wiped the slate clean from the race of Ancients - a race of misshapen monsters that dared to challenge the Divine, and that mankind was made anew, in three castes - one to commune with the divine, another to rule, and the last, to serve. Any evidence to the contrary has been wiped out by the Orthodoxy during the Purification centuries ago.

But the land remembers. Ruins of toppled towers, toxic pools leaching poisons from below, and sinkholes of crumbling concrete slabs buried beneath the soil.

When a farmer stumbles upon a towering metal fin rising out of the earth - part of a structure no living soul can name - the kingdom's foundations of belief begin to shift. The king sends a secret expedition to investigate: a team of scholars, warriors, and his own daughter, venturing into the forgotten region once known as Singapore, now joined to the mainland by centuries of sediment.

What they uncover is no ruin. Beneath the dirt lies a nearly intact relic of the Ancients - vast, silent, and utterly alien to the world that surrounds it. As excavation begins, the team must decipher an architecture without reference, symbols without language, and technology that appears to bend natural law. But the Orthodoxy is watching, and not all knowledge is meant to return.

As political tensions rise, power fractures, and faith is tested, the expedition threatens to unravel the delicate balance holding the kingdom together. And in the shadow of a civilization that ruled nature, the meaning of divinity, destiny, and memory is rewritten - not by prophecy, but by evidence.

Temple of the Bird Men is a cinematic work of speculative fiction - mysterious, suspenseful, and richly layered. Told through shifting perspectives, it invites readers to inhabit a post-collapse world where the remnants of our present become the sacred relics of a future unable to understand them. What we leave behind, others will one day mistake for myth.

For readers of literary science fiction, post-apocalyptic mythology, and contemplative futures shaped by forgotten truths.