Lieutenant Sawyer couldn't help but superimpose the past onto the future as they walked to the dretch's home. Even a few years ago the area they were walking through would have been a bustling small town, with people crowding the sidewalks and hovercars swarming the road. The sun would be gleaming off the buildings. Rapid City, South Dakota, had become a metropolis by 2098, on the cutting edges of cybernetics and material technology, as well as near the largest herds of bison.

The general coldness of the state worked well to deal with the required smelting, and the tax incentives didn't hurt. Throw in a meatpacking plant just outside the city, and Rapid City quickly became a center of cybernetics. By 2042, its population soared past the million mark for the first time, and its population just kept growing; when The Cataclysm, it had just gone over ten million people.

The quiet land was all that remained of that metropolis. The people were mostly dead or gone, killed by The Cataclysm outright or eaten by the monstrosities it had brought with it. No people meant no hovercars and the few remaining buildings were falling into one another like dominoes for deities. Every day was filled with the sound of falling and crashing cement as another building lost another ten stories. When The Cataclysm struck, the planet was almost killed. Starting in South America and moving around the world, tectonic plates shifted dramatically, resulting in some of the most dramatic volcanic activity the planet had ever seen. This was not hyperbole; the Ring of Fire, the volcanoes that surrounded the Pacific, all erupted at once, drowning islands and cities in smoke and lava.

Every continent was hit by earthquakes. Cities fell into cracks that opened everywhere. Ecosystems around the world were devastated. Not even the seas were spared, as even the coldest depths were heated a few degrees. As the polar ice caps melted, the rising waters flooded huge tracts of land, making Earth's surface almost 90% water. No one was spared: In mere weeks, Australia had become the largest archipelago on the planet. The Yosemite supervolcano devastated the Midwest. Volcanoes thought extinct roared into life on every continent. Those areas not outright destroyed were covered in feet of volcanic ash, but that didn't last long as gale-force winds whipped through the area.

In short, in the course of a few weeks, the Earth was physically transformed on almost every level. The oceans had risen almost twenty meters, eating well into the shorelines and converting large areas of land into the ocean floor. Sections of land that had been blasted by volcanoes that had been thought long asleep were practically moonscape more than earthscape. The mountains had been lowered in some areas and new mountains had risen up in other areas.

The dust kicked into the atmosphere and blocked all of the sunlight coming down for more than a year, killing plants around the world. The death of the bottom layer of the ecology quickly resulted in the death of the animals depending on them, and then the animals depending on them.

Life had been dealt a major blow. Entire sections of Earth were lifeless. Only 10% of humanity remained, and only because of the arcologies, underground bunkers, and survival training of its most paranoid.

Maps had to be redone by geographers recovering from their losses. Cities smelled of the rotting dead, making them a scavenger's paradise. Suicides were a common cause of death as the survivors realized the magnitude of their loss.

Life would return to the planet, but it would take decades. Even now, four years later, most of the plants were new growth as older trees had been outright killed by the heat and wind and the animals were just reasserting their place in the food chain. Ironically, it had been man's preparation that allowed this, with seed stores and zoos fueling the planet's rebirth. Even life on the seas was making a comeback.

But Fate was not yet finished. The satellites just stopped responding, causing the World Wide Web to tatter and cellular networks to fail. Suffice to say that any cables were useless, destroyed as the land in which they were buried shook itself to pieces. Fortunately, shortwave radio had always been a popular hobby, and so ham operators remained to allow some sort of communication, lasting as long as their equipment did.

And the blue zones began to appear. The largest went from one pole to another, kilometers thick at the equator. Others were localized in areas, but were apparently random in their placement; they could run for short distances, cross others, or even circle areas. To most, there was no rhyme or reason to their placement, but some said that they shared the same locations as places that were once sacred, known for the paranormal, or where the things that went bump in the night bumped.

The zones were characterized by the slightly deeper blue during the day and the glowing blue at night, not bright enough to provide light but enough to make their presence known. Physics inside the zones were subject to the whims of gods mad with the fires of rebirth: Some sections randomly reversed gravity and were warmer or colder than nearby areas even to the point of having their own blizzards while the surrounding areas were enjoying summer, or just had different flora and fauna than was around them. And that ignored the elemental storms that happened every so often, storms of not just water or ice, but of stones, molten steel, even fire, with the wind blowing any direction including up and down, with clouds that could turn people to glass, stone, or even trees.

Making it worse were the portals that would open up every so often. Some would be open for mere minutes, others for days, and sometimes something would come out. Some would travel, changing the landscape into something alien, and even the ones that remained motionless allowed views of landscapes that shouldn't exist. They would come during solstices, equinoxes, midnight, high noon, or during the storms; there was no true way to predict their appearance. They could be eddies in the turbulence of the ethereal phlogiston for all anyone knew.

But those that came through could be the biggest dangers. Most were just humans or even aliens displaced from their native worlds; while their appearance may have been strange, they posed no real danger to those around them, even when entire villages were displaced. They were confused, scared, and usually able to find a way to contribute when allowed. However, there were creatures that came through that were willing, ready, and able to kill whoever they met; they saw their new surroundings as new territory full of new prey. Some of the natives were willing to take in those displaced and hunt the predators; some natives made no difference between them, hunting all who came through the portals.

And then came the dragons and unicorns, and then other beats from myth and legend. While most kept to the blue zones, requiring the energies present to survive, others went into surrounding lands, forever changing the local ecologies. Some only stayed around for the next portal to open, while others set up their lairs, intent on preying upon the local humans, be it for food or fun. War colleges soon accepted mythologists, as their knowledge quickly became important. And if the beasts and fae weren't bad enough, there were many demons but few angels.

Magic had returned, and so did the mages. Some found themselves able to throw energy bolts while covered with auras of invincibility, sometimes creating and summoning items. Some were modeled after the mages in comics and legend, while some just manipulated the energies to make their lives easier. There was a definite difference between the mages that could create a wide variety of effects versus the hedges who only mastered a few basic talents. Some became witches, dependent on the magic given them by others, while others became psychics, not as powerful as the others but able to use their abilities outside the blue zone.

All of this made life much more interesting, as you could never truly tell who could destroy you with a thought, who were demons pretending to be human, or who were just plain crazy. That uncertainty alone caused a certain amount of death and destruction, but some were more fortunate than others. Lieutenant Sawyer had been stationed at a base that managed to survive The Cataclysm and one that had just been stocked. Combined with the concepts shared by some of the soldiers with doom prep experience, the base thrived. They had even begun producing their own ammunition and clothing to trade with local ranchers. They had even begun the provisional enlistment of aliens and mages.

Promotions were slow in coming, however; it seemed that once you hit specialist, someone would need to die for you to get promoted. Morbid, but few were retiring and there was nowhere to be transferred to, but deaths, sadly, were a regular feature of life after The Cataclysm. Some officers even wondered about who would take their spots when they were killed by the demons or brigands. She smiled as she walked down the road, every stone a memory. A roar brought her back to the present, a sign that they had reached the dretch's lair. Time to earn my pay, she thought as she readied her weapon.