The Day of Fate
The Day of Fate is not remembered fondly or at all by most people, and for good reason. This was the day the old world ended. This was the day humanity doomed itself for many generations to come. The Day of Fate is the single most destructive event in human history with no other event ever claiming as many lives or causing so much damage. This is how it happened.
It all started the year 2050 A.D of the old calendar. Back then humans were the only sentient race that lived on earth, and they prospered. There were more than 3900 times as many humans as there is now and they all lived in massive cities on the surface. Cities that scraped the sky above them, made out of shining metal and stone. In this old world a group of scientists in the large country known as the United States of America had created an interdimensional gateway to the elemental plane of magic. A whole alternate dimension filled with a powerful new force of nature. They managed to harvest it and create a new era of prosperity. But raw magic was, and still is, dangerous. Too much exposure to it will quickly destroy a human body from within, similar to radioactivity. And unfortunately the US military saw this. They created bombs more deadly and powerful than any nuclear bomb before them - magic bombs capable of wiping out entire provinces and irradiate a much bigger area than that. And on the 13th of July 2054 A.D. the first missiles were launched to devastating effects. Due to the various bomb sites that came afterwards it is not known which country were hit first, but they answered with bombs of their own. This escalated quickly and involved many more countries, thus starting the short-lived but devastating World War 4. But eventually it had to stop.
The fallout from the superweapons had spread too quickly, and because magic was still so new and so unknown there was no known way to cleanse it. Humans all across the world quickly died a painful death to radiation poisoning, some even countrywide. The survivors had no choice but to flee underground to various large cave systems where their descendants still remain today. Thus ended the Day of Fate (which would be more accurate to call the Year of Fate) with the few human survivors leaving their world behind to be reclaimed by wildlife.
It all started the year 2050 A.D of the old calendar. Back then humans were the only sentient race that lived on earth, and they prospered. There were more than 3900 times as many humans as there is now and they all lived in massive cities on the surface. Cities that scraped the sky above them, made out of shining metal and stone. In this old world a group of scientists in the large country known as the United States of America had created an interdimensional gateway to the elemental plane of magic. A whole alternate dimension filled with a powerful new force of nature. They managed to harvest it and create a new era of prosperity. But raw magic was, and still is, dangerous. Too much exposure to it will quickly destroy a human body from within, similar to radioactivity. And unfortunately the US military saw this. They created bombs more deadly and powerful than any nuclear bomb before them - magic bombs capable of wiping out entire provinces and irradiate a much bigger area than that. And on the 13th of July 2054 A.D. the first missiles were launched to devastating effects. Due to the various bomb sites that came afterwards it is not known which country were hit first, but they answered with bombs of their own. This escalated quickly and involved many more countries, thus starting the short-lived but devastating World War 4. But eventually it had to stop.
The fallout from the superweapons had spread too quickly, and because magic was still so new and so unknown there was no known way to cleanse it. Humans all across the world quickly died a painful death to radiation poisoning, some even countrywide. The survivors had no choice but to flee underground to various large cave systems where their descendants still remain today. Thus ended the Day of Fate (which would be more accurate to call the Year of Fate) with the few human survivors leaving their world behind to be reclaimed by wildlife.
Historical Basis
Not much is known exactly how the Day of Fate happened. But it is known that it did indeed happen. Survivors of the event wrote down or otherwise documented their experiences and made sure to pass them on just so the future would know what had happened. Some of these logs still persist today, or at least rewritten logs. Thus we know the base of what happened, what some countries and cities were called and the state of the survivors. There were even pictures that have been artistically restored a few dozen times.
Spread
The amount of people who know about the Day of Fate can be counted in just triple digits. The event was and still is humanity's biggest sin and biggest shame, and if it were to come out the city would be thrown into chaos. Therefore only a few historians in a few separate cities know about the event, almost all of them human. Although there is one exception; the city of Rakaska in the former Nepal. There the truth of the Day of Fate leaked out, throwing the population into a blind rage that lead them to destroy the humans that put them underground for so long. Even though most of the humans there knew as little as everyone else about it. The other cities, while unknowing of anything related to Rakaska, know that this could happen to them and therefore withhold this information to everyone.
Variations & Mutation
As the millenia have gone by the Day of Fate have been more and more twisted and misremembered. The facts that are still intact are the date, the bombings and humans fleeing underground, but the scale, effects and old world facts do not add upp. Some cities like Akadence and Aetherwatch have blown the general scale out of proportion, claiming that one bomb was enough to contaminate a continent and that it all happened in just a week. Others downplay it. Cities like Underköping believe that there weren't any bombs, just a lot of pollution and waste from the magic industry that slowly poisoned the world. Some cities claim that humanity has always lived underground and the surface world of old is nothing but a myth, others believe it was an otherworldly utopia. And yet others think affected people burst into flames or turned into beasts upon getting irradiated. The tales about the Day of Fate vary, but very few are true.
Artistic rendition of the effect of the weapons
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