Ashrain

14 AE

There was no war. No fighting. No heroes. No great and mighty struggle for humanity. They came, and we died.   All of us.   No invasion. No uprising. No last stand. They just wiped us out. It only took a day. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution, and an asteroid wipes out the dinosaurs. Thousands of years of technological, philosophical, and scientific revolution, and humanity ended in a single afternoon.   Just about, anyway.   What's left of our world? Ashes. The land is desolate. The oceans boiled. Burnt rock, raging fires, spewing volcanoes, and the enormous crevaces they're boring into the crust with their colossal constructs are all that's left of a once thriving planet. Why are they here? No one knows. Mining for minerals, maybe? Poetic justice for humanity? We wanted resources, so we burned down the rainforests. They wanted whatever they want, so they burned down the whole world.   What's left of us? How many? Where? Who knows? Who cares? It doesn't matter anymore. We were the dominant species of Earth long enough. Now, we're back in the wild, fighting to stay alive. There's no insurgency. No taking back our planet. It isn't ours anymore. It's not even Earth anymore.   The cataclysm that ended us choked the atmosphere with smoke. It falls like black snow, leaving a thick blanket of soot across the entire planet. So those who survived call this place, this nightmare, this hellscape that was once our home, Ashrain.