The World
The world is a husk of what it once was. When one looks beyond the Walls, all that spans the horizon are murky brown clouds that engulf the skies and shroud the land in dust. The heavens, the sun, and the moon rarely show their faces in the skies, hidden by the remnants of a world ravaged by an ancient cataclysm.
Ancient texts have mentioned that once upon a time, our cities covered the world, with great metal spires that pierced the clouds and their sprawling lengths that nearly turned every stretch of the world’s land into a jungle of concrete and steel. They mentioned things such as a wild natural world, ancient trees that lived for centuries, and vast cerulean oceans filled with myriad creatures. In those days, they said that humanity had reached even into the stars, and from the vastness beyond the clouds, had harvested the catalyst that granted any wish so long as one possessed it: Oneirum.
When they had taken this power, humanity declared itself a new god over its realm. All that one could desire was at one’s fingers. It was the ultimate solution to the endless desires of a people that had covered their world with their unlimited expansion, and whose wants and needs could all be served simply with this power.
Yet this golden era had to one day come to an end. The great structures where humanity had stored its harvested Oneirum exploded, and from them spewed a storm that enveloped the world. The records of the day that spelled the end of all conflict with one another, and the various inter-city factions continue to argue over its true reasoning. The Hall of Transcendence states it was the gods’ punishment for Humanity’s arrogance to suppose itself all-powerful from the acquisition of Oneirum, while the Academy writes it as a mechanical failure in its containment procedures, all while the Library insists that it was the doing of terrorists. Though all of these speculations remain unsupported, for the epicenter of the blast lies only at the center of an eternal storm, one that none have reached after the Cataclysm.
One thing remains true, despite the bickering between the modern world’s most brilliant minds. The sudden explosion of the central Oneirum containment facility released The Storm that flooded the world with mystical power. With this, everything changed. All the wishes, imaginations, and beliefs, of past and present, were fulfilled in that very moment by the vast reservoir of Oneirum that dissipated into the skies with relish at its regained freedom. Massive swathes of the world vanished into thin air, rewritten by Oneirum to be manifestations of imaginary realities and those that lived in them were replaced by terrifying beings spawned from myth and legend. And so, on that day, the boundary between reality and fiction collapsed.
In the few lands that were spared, stand the Cities where the last remnants of humanity cower. Few lands remained unchanged, for the great storm of Oneirum had ebbed and flowed across the world, and had spared but a few of its former masters and their homes. Perhaps it was these survivors that one could call the unlucky ones. In a bid to survive against the monsters of the outside, the Walls were erected around the Cities, massive constructions whose parts were the remnants of old towers and buildings of the previous era, fitted with Containment Field Projectors stolen from the ruptured storages of Oneirum to guard from the rampant storm that rages unending.
Behind these walls, what remained of humanity could be safe, though only for so long. Their stores of Oneirum slowly dwindled, and so too did their ancient technology that slowly decayed without the old factories running. Their wants and needs had returned to man, and desire returned to those who had lived in bliss. As the last remnants of the Old World fall apart, the people of the world stray further away from the utopia of the past, their world shattered by their own escaped tools.