Welcome to Arkedya!

A flash, and then nothing. Everything had been razed to the ground, exterminated by the madness of a few. The age of high technology had lifted humanity to new heights, and then, on a night when no one really knew what to do in such circumstances, it brought it back to its lowest ebb. Everything had returned to dust.

A nuclear winter first set in after the cataclysm. The Sun disappeared and the temperature dropped. The demons seemed to descend on the fate of this planet. Then the dissipated in turn and the light gradually returned. But the tragedy was such that the face of the world had changed and, instead of clarity on every horizon, a thick cloud was now visible. Nature itself sought to separate each tribe so that such conflicts would never arise again.

The Earth was returning to its most peaceful state. It could breathe again, the storm having passed. Or so it seemed: a handful of humans beings remained. No one could explain how or why. Beings so weak, so puny, so exposed to the slightest radiation that they could die. And yet, some survived. Some would later talk of mutations, of evolutions forced by tragedy. Chance will have made some of them more resistant, able of giving a new face to what might have been their species. Arkedya, as the living have renamed it, is not a new world, but a reborn world. A second chance, so to speak, for the lucky ones.

This handful was enough for a civilisation to be reborn if it achieved to have the intelligence to rebuild itself. The world could then start again on new, stronger foundations, drawn from the past. It would end up reinventing principles and instruments, retaining others by chance, and finally innovating to go beyond what had already been done. It could, yes, take on the face it should always have had.

Rebuild. That is the key word. Recover the level of technology we had wasted. To live, at last, in peace. We could think that these would be the guiding principles of this rebirth, we could hope that lessons would be drawn to avoid the evils we already knew all too well. We could wish, yes, that life would finally be smoothly.

But that was without taking into account the animosity that inhabits every human being: as soon as wealth returns and material problems fade away, old quarrels and jealousies resurface, as if we were made of a fabric of hatred and anger that we do not know what to do with apart from sometimes expressing it.

From trade to conflict, from alliances born of circumstances to hereditary enemies, from new powers to major new discoveries: all the strategies, from the most economic to the most warlike, are reappearing and gradually repopulating the Earth. The only real question is: how will you survive in this hostile world?