BLOOD OF THE DEAD GODS

In the words of Gareth B., former heavy infantry sergeant of United England

Many who see me now—ragged, tattooed with scars, with the gaze of an exhausted predator—believe that I was born into this barbaric world, that my soul was forged amid war drums and clouds of blood. They are mistaken.

I was born among towers of steel, in a land where the rain was acid and the gods bore the names of automated systems. I served United England, that old and proud megalopolis of fog, shrapnel, and protocols. Not Parliament or the bankers of the Northern Bloc. The idea. The defense. Our own.

For years I fought mutrants in the Wasteland, suppressed riots in the Rings of New London, and helped contain outbreaks in the Red Fields. I saw men go mad from a failed vaccine. I saw machines sing hymns to forgotten gods. I saw children born without souls, without eyes, only with a hole that begged to the sky. And yet, none of my campaigns prepared me for the horror that devoured us from the south. No order could silence the screams that the end brought with it.

First came the silence.

Austral City—a nondescript megalopolis, without grandeur or history, barely a footnote in strategic reports—fell into the void. It did not collapse or get bombed. It simply stopped talking.
Not even the fastest drones could cross its perimeter.

ommunication channels shut down without warning. Satellites stopped receiving signals. The drones sent in… did not return. Not even the Spectre-class probes, invisible to all but the gods themselves. Silence.

We thought it was a network failure, or an internal attack, perhaps viral sabotage. It wasn’t given much importance. Austral wasn’t essential. We didn’t need it. We were United England and we could fend for ourselves. The others could fend for themselves.

Months passed.

And the reports began. Not in the megalopolises, not yet. But in the vast expanses of the Wasteland. Those places where civilization dissolved into rust and filth. Where the mutards give birth in the darkness. Where the scrapers dig through the remains of a world that no longer understands their language.

That’s where the first ones appeared.

Scaly, pale, with dead fish eyes and an unnatural calm. Life forms with soft bones and damp skin, as if the sea had come to give birth to new children. They walked upright, as if they had forgotten the need to crawl. Their mere presence brought a stench of salt, rot, and time standing still. We called them the Deep Ones.

Then came the ghouls. Pale as the moon, with arms as long as bone whips, devouring bodies and leaving nothing but clean skeletons and muffled laughter. They slithered through the tunnels like fleshless rats, leaving behind a trail of horror and silence.

The higher-ups said it was all just stories. That the Wasteland had always been full of terrors. That the scavengers were exaggerating. That the reports were the product of radiation, drugs, or superstition.

But those creatures didn’t feed on fear.

They sowed it.

Little by little, evil infiltrated the megalopolises themselves.

First it was in Freiheitfestung, where the techno-priests began to build machines that no one had ordered, following plans that appeared in dreams. Then in San Angeles, where thousands of people fled from shared visions, all murmuring the same name: a name that was not recorded in any archive, but which resonated like a drum in the depths of the soul. Shared nightmares. Doors that opened without walls. Collective suicides. Dead languages spoken by children.

Even in United England—where coldness dominates everything, where even death is administered efficiently—an entire battalion gouged out their eyes during a vigil, shouting in unison that “the light had lied to them.”
And then we looked south. Toward where Austral City had disappeared.

And at last we saw the Mouth.

It was not a crater. It was a wound. A living sore that exhaled heat, steam, and lamentations. As if the earth itself had been torn apart from within and the bones of the world were burning. They called it the Mouth of Hell. And for the first time since the founding of Project Babylon, the megalopolises united.

Beijing, Silver City, United England, Freiheitfestung, Putingorod, San Angeles… they put aside their quarrels, their wars of code and power. They became a spear. A single spear. Forged with fear, tempered in despair.

The forbidden weapons were unleashed.

Space-folding bombs. Suicidal orbital satellites. Swarms of nanodisintegrators. Anti-gods programmed into intelligent cores. The earth was torn apart by detonations that ripped the soul from the living. Dark suns rained down, along with swarms that devoured flesh, metal, and memories. The sky opened like a wound, and from it sprang fire that did not illuminate, only devour.

The seas rose. The mountains cracked. The world bled. And yet… it was not enough.

I remember fire. A roar that filled my bones. A soulless light. And then… emptiness.

At first I thought I had died.

But it wasn’t death. It was something else. I woke up under an unfamiliar sky, without satellites, without coordinates, without orders. Just a pale, hot sun, and a world of swamps and stones, of whispering trees and beasts with too many eyes. A world of savage tribes, blood, and superstition.

Men believed that fire was a god. Shamans spoke with bones. Wars were fought with swords and spears made of bone and stone, not with drones or rifles.

I survived. Not as a soldier. As a beast. I learned their languages. Their songs. Their fears. I became a monster so I wouldn’t die.
For years I believed it was another world. A different plane. Divine punishment. Until I found the temple.

A ruin hidden beneath the jungle. Covered by centuries of mud, roots, and death. Guarded by broken statues, by idols that spat shadows. I descended through damp passageways, with symbols that no local shaman could have carved.

And at the bottom… metal. Not tribal iron. Metal like that used in megacities. And beyond that, screens, rusted cables, rotten cores… And there, among the rust, the emblem. United England. I understood everything.

It wasn’t another world, it was mine. Only thousands of years had passed.

The Unholy Lands are not a hellish plane. They are not a punishment. They are the future.

What came from the Mouth of Hell was not destroyed. It was liberated. And we believed that fire would be enough. It wasn’t enough.

My world did not die. It just knelt down and rotted. It crawled until it forgot its name. And now it is this. A dead empire crowned with bones and blood.

And I… I am possibly its last memory.