Age of Poisoned Sea and Sky

A time of perpetual night and endless winter, of tainted earth and water, the Age of Poisoned Sea and Sky nearly finished the genocidal work of the original Cataclysm. Whatever the exact nature of the great Cataclysm, the trauma of that disaster left a legacy of death the effects of which are still being felt in some parts of the world to this day. The Outlands of Merika are a good example of the kind of harshness referred to in historical records concerning the aftermath of the Cataclysm.
The only way in which the Cataclysm’s survivors and their progeny managed to survive the blighted aftermath was to take refuge deep beneath the Earth. Where underground water deposits, isolated and free of taint, could be found life could be supported. Most initial survivors were certainly not so lucky. To this day the tunnels of the survivors and their underground refuges can still be found. The ancient habitations in and beneath Paris’s old metro tunnels served as just such a refuge, though it is extremely rare to find people still living in such places, as was the case in Paris, so long after the end of the Age of Poisoned Sea and Sky.
The end of the Poisoned age is often said to fall somewhere between 150 and 200 PCE. Indeed, by the beginning of the Post-Cataclysmic Era, the dangerous toxicity of the ecosystem had already begun to abate. Popular legend often credits the end of the Poisoned age to the intervention of God-like beings, or the emissaries of an unknown superior civilization, but these stories belong to the mists of ahistory and cannot be validated.