Cw Apocalypse - Tumblr Posts

Pucci is happy to soothe the desperate people when a skin-melting plague breaks out - they just need to follow him and trust him and his God :) 

 We can share these now! Here is my finished piece made for the JJBA Apocalyptic Zine!

The Lost Starfarers

An excerpt from the book The Lost Starfarers by Dr. Erin Burke, published March 2472 CE. Image: the planet Hemera in 2470, seen from high orbit.

Ten thousand years ago, the apocalypse happened.

Not on Earth, of course; we were spared, and our pre-agricultural ancestors never knew the fortune that had shone upon them. But the ruins of nearly a hundred worlds in nearby space tell us everything: ten thousand years ago, the world ended eighty-seven times at once. Far more, in fact, if one counts the tens of thousands of shattered stations and constructs that lay scattered across the expanse of more than a dozen solar systems. Our own system did not fully escape this fate, and indeed the derelict station over Uranus is how we came to realize that, once, long ago, humanity was watched over by beings far more powerful than ourselves.

In our fledgeling centuries of starfaring we would come to learn that these beings called themselves "skgri'i," and came from a world called "o'Kora" -the planet now known to us as Hemera. Over two thousand metric years, they spread across the stars, developing their science and technology to heights we still will not match for another dozen centuries. And yet, somehow, they did not fully shed their primordial divisive nature –much the same nature as the human race– and this was ultimately their undoing.

Our predecessors, our cosmic kin who once flourished across the stars for millennia, were erased from existence in thirteen short years by the most cataclysmic war in known xenoarchaeological history -so absolute in its destruction that it has been simply dubbed "the Apocalypse." We know very little of the conflict itself, or of the terrible weapons with which it was fought, but we can still see plainly the cost that was paid: billions of souls eradicated by the actions of a few; thriving global ecosystems turned to dust in mere seconds; planets left scarred with radioactive craters and unnatural volcanic glass. Most worlds in space are simply dead, inert from their birth... but can you fathom looking upon a world which was killed?

Centuries ago, Earth’s scholars puzzled over the lack of evidence for advanced intelligent life in the universe. After much thought and debate, some proposed an event common to the development of all sapient species called the Great Filter: that which determines whether a civilization will achieve starflight or collapse into oblivion. The ancient Hemerans show us the sobering truth: only cooperation will see us through the Great Filter, because cooperation is the Great Filter. We must take to heart the lesson which those magnificent starfarers did not survive to learn: if we do not forge our path through the stars with goodwill and camaraderie, all that awaits us is the end.