Light, Glorious Light

The Old World

The novice Lore Keepers retell the tale of the old world as their first story, a history of man's arrogance. They always start with a handful of sand and a song of repentance to The Great Mother. The sand is scattered at the feet of their audience. They then point down at their handiwork, and with solemn tone they begin:

In a different time, the waste had been part of a great nation called The Usa. For generations the people of The Usa prospered, and with them so prospered the world. But nothing lasts forever. The Great Mother looked down upon her children and was displeased. They turned her waters brown, and burned her forest to ashes. They'd forgotten that the world was her gift to her children. They'd forgotten that the world wasn't theirs to consume.

The Great Mother awakened the seas, sending them to swallow the peoples of the old coasts, because they'd poisoned her once blue waters. The Great Mother then beckoned the sun, greatest of her subjects, to cast his gaze upon a land that had forgotten her wrath. The people of the old world ignited a fury within The Great Mother with their addiction to burning the blood of the earth. She looked away as man suffered under the sun's light, as man's cities burned. Rivers and lakes dried up even as the sea swallowed entire countries with gluttonous abandon. It was then that the people of the old world should have begged The Great Mother for mercy, but the people of the old world were proud and believed they could best a goddess beyond their understanding.

They put their faith in their bioscientists, men and women of the old world who had mastered an alchemical magic over the smallest of The Great Mother's creatures. They used that magic to create a serum meant to protect them from the blessed rays of the sun. The serum gave birth to a sickness within, a sickness that their magic could not control. The sickness had a mind, a hungry essence. In women it caused nausea and rash, but in men it found a home in which it could mutate into something more. The infected men became hyper-violent and insatiable, driven by their basic hungers. They consumed everything in their path, raping what they couldn't eat. The men of the old world became monsters. The sickness moved far faster than the bioscientist wizards could catch it.

The old world burned while their infection swept through the nations. Eventually the infected outnumbered man. Eventually it wasn't The Great Mother's children that dominated her world but man's misguided creation. Eventually the children of man inherited a barren earth.

Survivors carved the new world out of the husk of the old with The Great Mother's blessing. They sang songs of her benevolence, and told stories of the world that once was so that none would forget. They fought for scraps from a dead civilization, and kept clear of the infected.

Over time much of Usa has become a desert. What has not been claimed by the sand has been abandoned to the infected. The waste has become a gauntlet meant to challenge one's ability to survive. Food, water, medicine, and healthy men are commodities that the faithful must fight and die for, because though The Great Mother has forgiven, she has yet to forget.