We can’t run forever.
What was left was not just a desert, but a battlefield that must have seemed eternal. For decades, people – real human beings were born into a world that suffered from cycles of destruction and restoration, glimmers of hope and crushing disappointment, and pointless murder. Lives were almost impossible to fill with meaning, as meaning was impossible to find under the reign of ignorant, artless warlords.
To make life in these primitive times even worse, abominable biomachines, terrible creations of the people who brought the Moontear down, roamed the hellscape of Europe. Left to their programming after the impact of the Moontear, the surviving bioconstructs preyed not only on what was left of the European ecosystem and the forces of the warlords, but especially on the few tribes of deserters that attempted to lead a hidden, peaceful life far away from the soul-devouring war machine.
just
It is a miracle, then, that this age came to an end without bringing the extinction of terrestrial humankind. From its ashes rose a continental community of druids dedicated to the restoration of life on the former battlefield.
From the Open Worlds Archive, “Age of Penance”
christoph-david volbers 