All that remains

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by Prof

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The people of Born aren’t very religious.
You don’t revere Gods who destroyed your world – twice.

Not many records were successful preserved through these troublesome centuries.
But a few things we still know.

Some time our world was green. We had seasons, who were more than mere marks in a calendar. We could leave town without protective clothing. Everything was filled with life. The entire world was populated. 10 billion once, they say.

It’s not known, when the first change came. Whether the number wasn’t preserved for posterity or everything happened too slowly for determining a single year, it doesn’t matter anymore.

Temperatures rose, the climatic zones started to move, the green vanished and a desert devoured the landscapes. Storms, circling the entire world, erased everything the drought left behind.

Our Ancestors didn’t just stand and watched our world change. Although how could a mortal stand against all-powerful forces of nature? Environment wasn’t longer able to support their lives. So they built own, smaller ecologies, shielded from the more and more hostile growing world outside.

Seven monstrous edifices were made that way. Hardly one could call them cities. They were too big. Mountains made from metal, ceramics and concrete. Stretching to the clouds in the sky and digging into the ground the same distance. An area, practically expanding from horizon to horizon turned in one enormous building. Circular and domed like a shield, to give them shelter.

What they did. Through centuries? More like millennia’s. No one knows for sure. Eventually the storms died, and some time rain fell again. People crawled out from under their shields and started to build their world again.

Green spread anew, every generation developed a greater piece of farm- or residential land from the once abandoned ground. The suburbs that grew around the shields connected themselves though streets. First among each others, then across the continents. And like buds on a twig more settlings spread among this ways. Again a world of life.

A single moment changed it.

They called him Storm rider. He arrived so quick and unexpected from an unmonitored part of the sky, they noticed him shortly after he passed moon orbit. I doubt the mighty ones could have changed the outcome, if they discovered him earlier, though. The rider was no mere rock, he was a flying mountain.

No god could have stomped on the ground of our world with that power, when the rider impacted near equator on the central continent, eradicating the shield and the land Gehenna.

One says the shockwave could still be felt after its 4th lap around the globe. Some months later it was dark on the entire world. And cold came.

Another time our ancestors hat to flee from an environment, which was no longer habitable. This time though, the change came too quick, too merciless.

One single shield they could prepare. Could be outfitted to stand against the opposite forces it was built for. Everything else was suffocated by ice and the glaciers.

Shield Erebos is the only, last populated town on this planet. Home of 50 million people from different species. The last remains of 10 billions. Everything is over, should this town fall.

And that’s when I enter the game.

I can look into the future. And I’ve seen the war, which would destroy the town from the inside. But in my visions I’ve found possibilities, how to prevent this outcome.

I will protect this town. And if this would mean I have to steal, hurt, blackmail and climb over entire heaps of bodies, so be it.

Gather behind me, or step aside.
But don’t come in my way!

- Darius Fang

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