Were The World Theirs.

It has been repeated ad nauseum that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. Looking over the events of the last twenty years, and of the so-called “Precursor” events that have been identified even up to a century ago, I’m forced to wonder just how many times we’ve doomed ourselves already.

It is with a mind to prevent our perhaps-deserved annihilation that I am currently penning this account, though with the Winter War so fresh in so many minds I doubt it will find a steady readership in this decade or the next. Indeed, with such a wealth of veterans and survivors, I doubt many people would even see the need – such events, as I have heard far too many claim, are unforgettable.

Perhaps such naysayers would be best reminded that their ancestors believed the same thing – and it nearly cost us our planet.

I am compiling this account from within a walled town of five-thousand souls – amongst the biggest left in the United States. There is no electricity: there are no cars. The world of yesteryear is a fading memory, and despite our best efforts there are too few humans left alive to recreate the world we knew.

There are currently less than half a billion Homo sapiens left by best estimation, consolidated mostly in India, Western Europe, and the east coast of Australia. Much of mainland Asia is currently empty, despite extensive recolonisation attempts: the Chinese, once so populous, are now functionally extinct. In total, for every man, woman or child that survived the Winter War, thirteen have been captured or killed.

Humanity, which had stood so close to a single, united world, has become disconnected in a way not seen since before the Industrial Age. Many of those alive today know little of the War outside of their own country: when the Cold Ones, as they are so popularly known, destroyed our communications network, many lost contact with events even outside their own town.

This record is as much for them as for the scholars of generations yet to come. For this account is not my own: rather, it is the experiences of many, gathered in the course of my work for the New United Nations. These are first-hand accounts of the war – of the events that nearly tore our world apart. For many, the wounds of the past are still too fresh to be revisited, at least comfortably. But revisit them we must –not for our own sake, but for the sake of our children. And our species.

Only by remembering the signs of the apocalypse, those portents and omens that herald the coming of the Cold Ones, can we anticipate their return. And they will return. Not soon – the fickle nature of the Enemy will not allow them to rally as a whole for many years. But time is on their side. They can wait until we have forgotten them as our grandfathers did. And then, when night falls – when winter once again beckons – the Cold Ones will return.

And we must be ready for them.