Watching the End of the World

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

The sight of the missiles nearly made her sick. Everything around her took on new context. It was such a peaceful afternoon, and the sirens hadn’t gone off, and here she was, watching the trails the missiles painted in the cloudless sky. And now she was blessed with a newfound psychic ability that told her that everything in this spot would be vapour in a half hour. The wheat, the forest, the road; everything. Anyone who wasn’t looking at the sky didn’t know it yet. To folks indoors or out of view of the vapour trails, it was still a beautiful spring. It took a half hour for Vekllei missiles to reach China. Theirs took about the same to get here.

The sirens didn’t go off until five minutes after the missiles launched. You could tell they were civil defense sirens because they built up to a whine and stayed there, a sound they’d all heard in drills, but it wasn’t drill season. Tzipora scrambled down the side of the ditch and took her bike with her, and sat cross-legged in the brook with her hands over her eyes. If everything became bright she’d hold her breath and lie face down until she was either dead or the sonic boom flung her downstream.

On May 6th 2064 the mid-Atlantic country of Vekllei, China, and the United States participated in a confused nuclear war that nearly annihilated North America and East Asia. In Vekllei, two bombs hit, and the rest of the Chinese delivery aircraft was downed by the air force. The two small-yield ground-burst weapons killed only 20,000. Many millions were saved by the comprehensive civil defense of the country. The United States lost forty million people. China is unknown, but is likely in the hundreds of millions after the full retaliatory strike from two separate countries.

The war had wider consequences, as it awakened ancient creatures underground that were built to protect the Earth. The creatures, called Lehmenan in a dead tongue, would in the weeks following the war attempt to wipe the surface of the world clean of human society.

You can read about Tzipora here and here. The Lehmanen, angels and spirit worlds are described in my post here. Learn more about the country of Vekllei here.

Or, hell, you could just ask me. I love questions and critique of my artwork, which I’m desperately trying to improve.

Thanks for listening!