Blue Sky Theory

The Lionhead Nation, half-tarnished jewel of a world in shambles. The marble facades of her capital still jut defiantly over a populace grown as nervous as they are haughty. Her avenues are clean-swept, her hedges trim, but she rots from within. Even as she resists being swamped by the chaos of global decline, her ghettos and sewers brim with undesirables, her prisons with soothsayers. The marble facades tremble. In a spasm of hyperopic rage, The Lionhead Nation musters her troops and rushes to complete the manufacturing of a mechanized titan of war, the Tortoise. Sending her armies forth like bees swarming for a new hive, she imagines a brilliant future spread out over the burned-out and trampled wreckage of the past, a world fashioned in her image.

But the ghettos, the sewers, the prisons burst, the mad and the desperate riot through the streets, the dutiful Tortoise doubles back and scrubs the streets clean again with rivers and rivers of fire. It rumbles through brand new marble ruins and out into the wasteland, becoming a monster whose name dwindling mothers whisper to their dwindling offspring, a fable like that of the once-blue sky. Somewhere an urchin borne of rubble makes her way through long leagues of ash and snow, comforted and guided by vibrations from below. A phantom of a man trails behind her, her unwitting caretaker and the witness to her sacrifice. For the Earth needs good water and there is none. It needs warmth and there is none. It will then have blood.