Devastation. Rubble. Famine.
That was what had become of Earth. From the dawn of the 22nd century to about a decade before Luca died, the world had been trapped in a perpetual state of war.
Needless to say, it was on a scale never before seen. It began slowly: a few countries in the Middle East fighting over stolen land. Nothing for the East, where first-world nations reigned, to worry about.
Until it was.
Corruption seeped into every government body across the globe, sparking revolutions worldwide. Chaos reigned supreme. Civil wars erupted: catastrophic, of course.
But once those burned out, the true hell began.
Difference, inequality, injustice. All of these factors culminated in one small nation becoming the spark for the destruction that followed.
As it stood on the brink of conquest, that nation made its final choice: it unleashed its full arsenal upon its enemies.
Despite its small land area, this nation was one of the thirty or so that had acquired nuclear weapons. And so, they unleashed them.
Countries. Continents. Millennia of history reduced to ashes within hours. With millions dead, every nation that had been struck retaliated, launching their own nuclear arsenals in a desperate frenzy.
It didn't take long for Earth to be plunged into a nuclear winter. From the rubble, micro-civilizations began to emerge. Great city-domes were constructed, artificial sanctuaries built to sustain the remnants of humanity.
And with this new era came new faith. A new religion. Neo-Equilibria.
The belief in the God of Balance. The hope that all the devastation, all the death, would one day give birth to a better world.
And this belief wasn't born out of nowhere. For once, there was tangible proof that this God might actually exist. His supposed Apostle, a man as close to perfection as one could imagine, preached this new faith.
There was no sacred book, no commandments. Only actions.
Entire cities rose from the ground in moments. Polluted rivers turned crystal clear with a wave of his hand. For the five hundred million humans still clinging to life, this was warmth in the middle of a snowstorm.
But where was Luca in all this? When the last of the great wars ended in 2146 and this new religion began to spread, Luca was a forty-year-old man. He had served in the Eastern European Union Air Force as a stealth bomber operator.
He had followed orders, and in doing so, had played a part in bringing about the very destruction that consumed the Earth.
He had once had a wife and children, but they had perished during the war. With nothing left to return to, Luca joined a group of exiles: people who had committed the unforgivable, but more importantly, rejected Neo-Equilibria.
They believed humanity had doomed the Earth through its own arrogance, and that no so-called god could undo what had been done.
The term exile was, in truth, far too generous. They were rejects, hunted out of the great domed cities and forced to survive in the wastelands beyond their protection.
Life outside was cruel. The land was barren, the air thick with poison, and agriculture impossible. Yet somehow, they endured. For years, they built a society of outcasts and sinners, united by repentance and survival.
Until the year 2157, when everything changed.
The God of Balance had become a sort of reigning entity, governing above everything and everyone. That being said, obviously, no one had ever seen Him. Only his apostles.
Well, that all changed May 11th 2157. By then, most exiles had left the group for good, either dying, killing themselves, or regaining society.
To the point that, worldwide, less than ten non-believers remained. Well, not non-believers, but rather those who reject having a god govern them.
It was crazy to Luca, one of these ten remaining individuals, that humans reverted back to a religious society despite all the war and bloodshed it had caused and that they still felt the consequences of today.
By then, Luca was in his fifties. He lived by himself, in the woods, surviving off food pods.
Suddenly, on that fateful day in May…
God descended.