The Face of Human Extinction

This article is archived, and is no longer part of Vekllei canon.

All servants of heaven — called angels by most people but they belong to a much older name — are viciously jealous of human beings. In creation, the Earth was promised to them, but the creator God gave the Earth to the human race. In a fit of rage, the angels — or Derden, as they were called before the current chapter of humanity — buried bioengineered monsters called Lehmenan far below the surface of the Earth. If humanity ever became reckless and destroyed themselves, they would awaken and wipe the Earth clean with great lances of fire.

In 2063, Red China suffered a military coup d’etat, and the ensuing Sino-American nuclear exchange consumed both countries in a great fire that destroyed vast swaths of forest and the creatures and spirits within them. The Lehmenan began to wake.

Tzipora, an unremarkable girl in the small mid-Atlantic country of Vekllei, stands in front of the bones of an Angel, or Derden, and begs it to let her into the spirit world to stop the Lehmenan. The Derden hates human beings, and it fills her lungs with blood to try and scare her away. She stands steady.

It was in this moment, in the shadow of fallout in a wind-swept field of rural Vekllei, that a child dressed in the uniform she wore to school became an ambassador for the entire human race. Not before or since has such a remarkable image of humanism in the face of God existed.

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