Cataclysm
0 PT (Post-Tempest)
"And sometimes,
it is to a nightmare instead."
-O. Tarcis, The Enypneion
The world had turned to ash.
Nobody could speak of the nature of the raw
apocalypse that had just ravaged humanity on Novaluna, spoken only in whispers as the Tempest. For its nature was a mystery. Beyond the bounds of human civilisation... all was normal and quiet. The moon itself, the native life upon it, and the planetary system to which it belonged showed not the slightest iota of unusual change. The only sign that something profound beyond conception had occurred were the stars. They were different. Yet few noticed, for few remained to remember what the night sky looked like before.
Because within the sphere of humankind, society itself had been brought to its knees. In a trend clearly concerning, nearly all psionic technology—by then pervading every aspect of life—had self-obliterated, taking with it almost sixty percent of human life on Novaluna and the foundations of civilisation in which it had been embedded. Infrastructure supporting grand and prosperous cities teeming with millions, reduced to dust and rubble. Countless quantities of information, codifying the great histories and accomplishments of humanity, wiped clean from existence. History reset, amnesiac to what came before.
From the Brink
0 PT - 50 PT
"Death is negotiable. Failure is not."
-Superintendent Talron Heth
Yet so it had happened; humanity on Novaluna had crawled its way through Armageddon manifest. Emerging as shattered and broken as the ruins around them... yet nonetheless alive. And furthermore restless are men, women, and children still breathing, for as long as there are breaths to be taken, there are
challenges to surmount, aspirations to claim, and progress to be had. Their fate reborn anew, the people remaining of Novaluna set forth once more to forge its path, however it may proceed.
Yet never is history so easily escaped. Of the vast and wonderful corpus of humanity that the Tempest had sent to the void, fragments nevertheless survived. Small and scattered, yet key to the secrets prior humankind had left its successor. As civilisation rebuilt itself from the ground up, piece by piece these shards of the past began to emerge. Even as the Tempest itself remained an enigma of the purest sort, gradually a picture of what came before coalesced. Distant, vague, yet speaking of a greatness yearning to be reclaimed.
And forever lost as well.
For while a few assigned themselves the imperative of restoring Novaluna as it had once been known, the great majority of humanity had already moved on; to the new entities arisen from the ash, these revelations were only symbolic, rhetorical niceties to append to their own grand etiologies. Their paths were their own now, and never would Novaluna exist as such again.
Riven Entire
50 PT
"For all the allegory about
their elegant rebirth, Phoenixes
really are monsters of fire."
-Enta, First Among Equals
If anything so characterised this novel path, never before trod, taken by Novaluna, its was that it split. Cruelly and inexorably.
With base survival of the utmost importance in the aftermath of the Tempest, the scattered remnants of the original 27 Novalunar colonies had neither the wherewithal nor the desire to rebuild close ties with their far-flung brethren, not when, prior to an inchoate reestablishment of rudimentary communication, many had forgotten the others with whom they shared their fate entirely. Thus were born the first divisions of Novaluna after the apocalypse, deeply rooted and destined to grow.
And as the objectives transitioned from survival, to recovery, to ascension, those divisions persisted, greater and more potent than ever. From the ashes of those 27 colonies, built by their 27 cohorts of survivors, 27 new civilisations arose. Some swelled to become vast, vigorous, and powerful, while others continued to wallow in the roil of chaos and conflict, yet for all their variance they held one thing in ironic commonality; they all were now separate, indelibly and incontrovertibly. And with their former kinship long lost to the past and their values stolen by cataclysm, to each other they were dystopia. Antagonists.
A millennium of strife had only just begun.