To explain how we managed to end the world in so many ways (do humanity get a prize for multitasking the end of the world?), I guess I need to tell you the big secret that 99% of the population was unaware back then. That magic is real.

A whole world existed under the common people awareness. Wizards, Sorcerers, Warlocks, Demons, Angels, Demi-gods the Fae and all sort of magical creatures from known and unknown legends lived hidden from almost everyone.

Now that you know that magic is real, (well if you are reading this you survived the end of the world so far and probably already knew it) I can tell you it wasn’t the reason the world ended, it might have facilitated it, but wasn’t what it started it.  What started it was just plain greed, stupidity and automation.  

I can’t point to everything that caused the unrest and built the pressure that led to the end of the world, but the way I see it, we developed automation too fast with no plan on what to do with everybody who lost their jobs to it.

In the 5 years that preceded the end, technology kept evolving at a rate that 70% of the occupations that existed in 2020 were replaced by machines and computers. That led to an even bigger concentration of wealth. That left us with an overpopulated world, where near all of it had no work and the dignity that comes with it. Adding salt to the injury, the people who had the resources to try looking for solution either didn’t care or were too slow.

As tensions raised, governments tried to control the masses. Nationalism politics, socialism politics, oppressive dictatorships, benefic dictatorships (!?), pure unregulated capitalism, everything was tried somewhere in the world at different levels. But the most common strategy to deal with it was the age proof strategy of blaming someone else.

So, tensions kept raising and blame was shoved to “enemies” of the nations, either internal or external. Talks about war and a rush to develop new weapons soon started a global Cold War.

The first spark was due to  biological weapons. The hysteria was so great that any new virus outbreak, from common or deadly flus to already existing rare virus like ebola was treated as possible enemy attacks. With minor wars and skirmish breaking out around the world.

The pot was already boiling and close to exploding when the first zombie outbreak happened on China, until today we don’t know if it was an attack or a research gone wrong. But the images shocked the world. And fortunately, the chinese military managed to contain and eliminate it.  

For a moment it seemed the world had a wake up call, the event being like a scape valve to the pressure and madness we were experimenting. People started to realize the rabbit hole the world was falling in.

But someone somewhere must have jinxed it.

Now, remember when I told you that magic was real? Have you wondered how it was kept a secret? Well it seems all the big players, the Council of the Magi, the Fae courts, Vampire Elders, Dragons, Gods and Demi-gods had some kind of accord that regulated a lot of things. And avoid being revealed was one of them.

Now one of the things that was frowned upon and in some cases outright banished was necromancy. I guess if hundred years old wizards and sages, immortal creatures of immense power and knowledge says something is a no go, we can be 100% sure some people are going to do it.

So at the time of the end, there was a war between the main council that regulated human magic users and a faction of rogue necromancers. This is relevant because the necromancers soon realized that the virus created zombies from the Chinese outbreak were perfect subjects. No magical cost to create and maintain also easy to control with magic. So they managed to steal a sample and started to use it as a weapon. Creating outbreaks on locations where the councils had strongholds and taking control of the hordes to strike at them.

Now this was successful at first, but soon counter measures were created, either by quickly finding and striking at the necromancers or breaking the magic they held of the zombies. No need to say, many of these attacks led to out of control zombies outbreaks.

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Now, take all this information I just gave you, and try to think how everyone else who didn’t know about magic saw this events. Enemy attacks and terrorism! Fingers started pointing again. And when a new outbreak on China reached North Korea, the nukes started flying.

I personally think that after the first waves of nukes we were fucked, but mankind could still rise again. North Korea was no more, when two nukes out of the dozens launched actually reached the United States (Las Vegas and San Francisco if you wondering) they leveled the place, even China and Russia nuked it, cause the situation was so bad that having a crazy regime with fingers on nukes and a tendency to try destabilize everyone else so it felt safe wasn’t an option.

South Korea and Japan suffered heavy losses, from both nuclear and regular artillery strikes from North Korea, and China was forced to use nukes on their own soil to stop the worse outbreaks from spreading. Russia and even the USA did the same to varied degrees.

Billions would die of  hunger, sickness, radiation and war, but half of the world was still standing.

But that is when globalization came back to byte us our asses. And it involved magic again.

You see, as I mentioned there isn’t only good wizards and bad wizards on the “hidden” magic world. There are fae, vampires, demons, angels, dragons and Dragons (trust me there is a difference), giants, old gods and eldritch abominations from outside our universe (Cthullu anyone?)

Now you wonder how could magic, regulating council or not, be still a secret with these many things existing. Well, many of those being existed on parallel worlds/planes of existence, some very close to our own like a shadow of our world, others so far away that can be considered entire different universes.

That is one reason. Now I don’t want to start a class on magical history, but it’s enough to say that with so many gods (or creatures who belived they are gods), demi-gods, elemental aspects of creation, there were a hell lot of wars fought on the magic community before things entered some kind of balance, those wars are usually documented in some form of myths all around the world, think the greek titans/gods/giants many wars, ragnarok, the wild hunt and many others. All these legends comes from somewhere.

So there were many losing sides in our long history. And many of those sides, being immortal, couldn’t just be killed, or being outsiders they just retreated to their own dimensions. So what the winners did was just sealing or banishing them.

Now, many of these seals and gates had to be maintained, or depended of structures made to tap on powerful ley lines of magic that exist on our world. Everyone can do the math and realize what happened to those prisons that were located on destroyed parts of the world. So now we had lots of powerful creatures with bones to pick wandering the new desolated parts of the world. Bad,  but manageable if all the powers that be, both magical and mundane worked together. Yeah, like that would happen..

Now, I better get back to the globalization part again before you all think I don’t know how to tell a good story (I don’t, but that’s not the case), those prisons and gates usually required especifical materials to maintain, paints made of rare flowers, sacred wood from petrified forest on Tibet and etc..   Now, for hundred if not thousands of years, those responsible maintained the resources themselves. In the last hundred years, industrial revolution, faster traveling means and the globalization made people careless. Why spend tons of resourses growing a rare Amazonian orchid on the middle of the Arizona desert if you can ship it from Brazil quickly. From what I heard, there was even a kind of magic UPS..

Now, this is just a crazy bad example that came to mind, but it suffice to say that due to the outbreaks, wars, nukes some crazy evil and powerfull being were released back in our world either as direct consequence or indirectly due to lack of resources caused by the disruption of the global trade and travels.

Quickly a (half?) world war started on the magic world and quickly spilled on the mundane world as well. So care to make a guess what the military would do when faced with a Titan like creature capable of controlling storms and a elemental Dragon capable of leveling mountains fight each other? If you guessed that the nukes started flying again, you would be right.

After that I can’t go in too much details, all was chaos. All the power and rules that controlled magic went crazy, I think the existence of so many powerful being at our dimension at the same time broke it. Some of those separated planes of existence crashed in to our reality, either ceasing to exist, completely replacing what existed before or merging with it somehow. We had huge earthquakes and tsunamis, mountains ceased to exist, while new ones were created as the world as we all knew ended.

Now, you might ask how I know all this, well to that you will need to listen to my story.

I was a regular guy once, I'm not telling you my real name, because they have power you know. Now I’m a Knight of the Unseelie, Captain of the expeditionary legion of the Fae’s Courts enclave on earth, my job is to lead a bunch of wizards, warlock, touched, soldiers and all around misfits in surveys outside the enclave shields to look for supplies, survivors and especially magic so we can keep living.