The first sunrise over the new era was fundamentally, mathematically perfect.
For exactly two hundred and forty days, the Earth had been choked by the bruised, violent violet atmospheric anomaly of the Category-Five integration cycle. The sun had been nothing more than a faint, toxic smear behind miles of hyper-dense terrestrial clouds.
But on the morning of March 4th, the star rose in a flawless, pristine blue sky.
Eighty miles east of the Abyssal Throne, a massive, ragged caravan of terrestrial survivors halted their agonizing march. There were roughly five thousand of them—a desperate, starving amalgamation of Old World civilians, low-level mutated scavengers, and battered military remnants. They called themselves the Ash Walkers. They had spent the apocalypse crawling through the ruined subway tunnels of the eastern seaboard, fighting Level 5 irradiated vermin for scraps of canned food.
