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.

This follows after Deaths in the Faerie Apocalypse, Part I

The returned gods had already started killing people, simply by direct deaths – smiting, experimentation, accident. However, they would up their death count by orders of magnitude when they began fighting amongst themselves.

When two gods fight, they often do so on a very large scale. Fireballs can miss their target. Ditto a cloud of ice. Ceilings can collapse – buildings can collapse. Ruin a big enough dam and a city can be lost in an instant. Set the wrong thing on fire and you end up with gruesome deaths.

The returned gods did all of this and more. They broke bridges, buildings, roads. They blew up gas stations. Any given ten minutes of the gods fighting looked like something out of an action movie (or it looked liked two people staring at each other and muttering. “Destroy Mind” leaves very little residue. But very few fights were conducted that way).

They fought over territory. Some unwisely claimed ancestral lands and then learned that the real meat was in other places, places that small, petty gods had claimed. Some found that three of four of them had claimed what had been different places, once upon a time, and were now one big city.

They fought over laws – how they would govern, how they would work in and around the human laws and power structures. They fought over perceived and real insults.

And then the Ellehemaei who had remained, tired of this show and indignant about the entire thing, got in on the act, and started fighting back.

How and why did the returned gods all return at once? Answer here: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/534926.html / http://aldersprig.livejournal.com/668774.html / http://addergoole.livejournal.com/237411.html

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

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/534355.html. You can comment here or there.

A discussion in several parts of the near-extinction of humanity in my Faerie Apocalypse Setting.

The casualties of the Faerie Apocalypse came in several stages.

The first few stages focused primarily on cities, especially the cities with the most dense populations, because the returned gods were drawn to those areas.

It is known from the readings of Addergoole that the Daeva and Daeva-bred half-bloods, called succubi as a whole, can feed off of emotion, using it as a combination of a drug and subsistence.

What was not covered in those books was the lesser but still strong effect that masses of emotion – in short, worship – have on all Ellehemaei. Although non-succubi fae cannot live off of the emotions of single people, all fae have a genetic weakness (akin to a propensity for addiction) to crowd/mob emotions.

So the returned gods, who had been exiled because they were trying to be gods, came back to earth and congregated in the most crowded ares they could find.

They, themselves, were the causes of the first casualties.

First, directly: smiting, tantrums, experiments.

Not all the returned gods treated humanity as their personal playground, but some certainly did. Some killed people to prove the point that they could. Some killed people in anger, when the worship was not exactly what they wanted.

Some were being extravagant in showing off their powers, and accidentally, for instance, electrocuted someone, or drowned them, or gave them a heart attack.

In northern Canada, a vengeful deity removed all of the clothing from a three-mile radius in late November.

Another god destroyed a dam holding back a mighty river – not on purpose, but because she wanted to show off her powers of water control.

And some wanted to know what made humanity tick, and took many of them apart in learning it.

This series of casualties, statistically speaking, was a small downturn in the human population. However, it was only the first step.

Part II – http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/534355.html / http://aldersprig.livejournal.com/668348.html / http://addergoole.livejournal.com/236978.html

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/531566.html. You can comment here or there.