A discussion in several parts of the near-extinction of humanity in my Faerie Apocalypse Setting.
The Gods’ Return: here
The Terms Used: here.

The returned gods killed a large number of people by direct or indirect smiting; in the process of claiming the cities, they killed an exponentially larger number with collateral damage.

When those Ellehemaei who had been here on Earth all along (or been born on Earth since the gods departed) got in on the act, fighting back against the returned gods, the collateral damage only got worse.

This is important, because what the humans tended to see was simply two freaks of nature tearing down buildings in their fight (flooding rivers, changing the course of storms, lighting city blocks on fire, and so on). They had – history, at least, had – no patience for divisions of “protecting humanity” vs. “enslaving humanity,” because all of these creatures were causing damage in their fighting.

The U.S. National Guard* had begun to mobilize as the first major damage occurred, but it was not until months later, when Los Angeles fell entirely under the sway of The Green Man, that Congress declared war on the invading army of gods.

At this point, the collateral damage numbers skyrocketed once again. War is a messy thing; war on your home territory is a horrible thing. Soldiers were sent unprepared into battle against gods (and there was only so well they could be prepared, even with advisers who knew what the Ellehemaei were and how to fight them); they died by the hundreds, and then by the thousands.

Then some genius discovered that you could kill an Ellehemaei if you dropped a big enough bomb on its head.

* Now with asterisk! – I am familiar enough with the U.S. response to be able to hazard a guess what they would do; I am far less familiar with the threat/disaster response in other countries. If those with familiarity there would like to lend a hand, I’d be appreciative.

Part IV – http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/546168.html

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/540099.html. You can comment here or there.

After this last Side Note

Terminology

I’ve been throwing around terms in this discussion, so I thought I’d pause to define some of them.

“Ellehemaei” are the race of people from Ellehem; this includes any cross-breeding with humanity that shows any traits of the Ellehemaei (inhuman traits, psychic abilities, magic, etc.) Singular: Ellehema

“Gods,” in general, refers to old, old Ellehemaei.

The Departed (Returned) Gods are those old Ellehemaei who left – or were sent away – and were thus trapped in Ellehem for millennia.

Oh, yeah, Ellehem. It’s another world, another universe, another planet – what, exactly, is unclear. It exists such that portals can be opened between its existence and ours.

Gods Above All is a term I threw out to describe Really Really Powerful gods. These guys are the ones that crossed over the last time the portals were opened, who got called things like Zeus and Hera, and who bred with a whole bunch of humans to create the gods and the Ellehemaei as a whole.

And Faded are humans who have the blood of the Ellehemaei in their veins but little or no visible sign of that blood.

Not mentioned yet in this series of stories but pertinent:

The breeds of Ellehemaei on Earth at time just before the Fae Apoc are Daeva, Mara, and Grigori (those who, respectively, inspire, protect, and guide) and their Nedetakaei (“bad guy”) counterparts the Dragons, Hunters, and Shepherds. There are also – as most of the students in Addergoole – any number of “half-breeds,” where the blood of the Ellehemaei in their veins was mixed enough that they displayed a different change than those three breeds.

“Half-breed” or “half-blood” is insulting, but also used rather casually in fae society.

Part III: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/540099.html

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/536825.html. You can comment here or there.