The war they wanted

2045 - The Great Religious War has just ended. Seventeen years of brutal fighting have wiped out more than ninety percent of Earth’s population. The survivors withdrew into isolated city-states, each cut off from the others. With most technology destroyed, humanity returned to the soil, relying on farming simply to stay alive. Religions settled across Europe, Asia, and Africa. Atheists and agnostics made their home in the Americas. Vast distances and devastated lands kept these groups apart, and slowly, the war faded from memory—without negotiation, without treaties, without peace. It left only one truth: the world may have stopped fighting, but it never healed. And in that broken silence, something else was waiting.