There states from before the fall of night live, entire peoples still locked in the wars and hatreds of a world consumed by ice long ago. The redoubts stand, a legacy of the genius and paranoia of their creators. But islands of civilisation endure in the night lands, some admittedly primitives crowded around volcanic vents and earth-current nodes, but others reach to the skies. Maybe they are connected with the dark shadows in the sky which occasionally block out the cold and distant stars, no sane being could say. Swarms of nighthounds, the Silent Men, the Vampires, the Unaussprechlichen and other abominations beyond counting. But there are worse fates than freezing to death, for in the night lands hunt terrible things. It is cold, the deep and bitter cold that goes to the bone. But around it is worse, the endless fields of snow and ice under a star-studded black sky. The loathsome cannibal empire of Tzeng, the mad scientists of the Republic of Antarctic, the maddening horrors of myriad eldritch islands that lie in the last sea. But even the green lands have their own nightmares. Who they are grateful to varies of course. No one knows why the green lands are spared the night that never ends, but all are grateful. But even here it is cold, and although there is light there is no sun. Around it men live as they once did, under a blue sky. The last green lands surround a new sea, the last sea of a world turned dark with night. The world was broken into fragments, and welded back together into something alien and foul to human eyes. The face of the earth was irreparably changed, a perfect sphere of ice, broken occasionally by towering peaks beyond any that existed before the fall of night. Lands sank and rose, continents collided with cataclysmic volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, forming new mountain ranges. Fire joined ice as the world’s tectonic plates began to shift. Things crawled in the darkness in the building snow. The morning of the 29th of August, 2069, was the last. Whether teuton, latin or briton none can say, but the rituals doomed the world. In the end someone did that which is anathema to sanity and life. Only the redoubts, giant mountains of metal designed to fight and survive such an apocalyptic war continued to stand, even as the nations which built them collapsed in a tidal wave of blood. Anarchy, madness and desperate fear spread across the continent. Empires crumbled and cities were reduced to ash.
Land Ironclads rumbled across fields irreparably contaminated by chemical agents, hundreds of thousands of drachenfliger duelled in the skies around the larger areocruisers. The war saw cities consumed by plagues last unleashed in the China war, which spread beyond the combatants to kill millions beyond the front. The long crisis in European affairs, the struggle between Paris, London and Berlin for the mastery of the continent, finally ended in fire.
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