Battlefield

Welcome to the Apocalypse + Ashes to Ashes

betas: Lea Summers is my lovely beta, and my two very good friends Jo and Gold both helped a lot in the plotting of this story.

notes: temporary title taken from the song "meet me on the battlefield" by svrcina, which i listened to on repeat while writing this, along with "i'm not afraid" by wondra. both are excellent songs so i recommend you click those links! if anyone has a suggestion for a better title, just let me know bc i'm not sure about this one.

now, i don't have a fixed schedule for this. i'm still working on my novel, my life is even more insane than it was at the end of dav and basically... yeah, i'll be sporadic at best. new chapters will come out... whenever they come out. i've been planning this fic for over a year, but i've only just started writing it. at least i have a good idea of what is going to happen throughout so now that i'm done with preparation, i can just, you know, write it.

i know i used to answer each and every comment i received with personal notes and all, but seeing how my life is... what it is, i don't think i can both write this and answer each and every comment. i do read each and every one of them, however, so be assured that if you write something, it will make me smile and help me through some very tough time. know that i love all of my readers, and that means you, who is reading this line right now.

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Prologue

Welcome to the Apocalypse

"This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper."
- T.S. Eliot

The world didn't end suddenly.

The world ended after a long, drawn-out malady, which affected all of its populations. It wasn't anything anyone had planned for, despite a few thousand years of dire warnings from all sorts by prophets, madmen and scientists of many different faiths, countries, and specializations. The Zoroastrians were the first recorded religious group to preach doom and destruction. "The end of the world is nigh", they had cried, long before the birth of the man who would be known as prophet and messiah. Others had soon picked up the cry.

Louder and louder they wailed, preachers and learned men, until the world as a whole turned their back, shook their heads, called them crazy. When one hears something too many times, one builds a resistance to the message, whatever it contains. Whether it be lies or truths, fabrications or facts, people stop listening, stop paying attention. And yet, they had predicted it all: the storms, the earthquakes, the plague....

The Plague.

It had started innocuously enough, considering the ramifications that would later result from simple, normal human activity. The spread of the disease had started first from the glaciers, scientists had determined, when there had still been scientists around to look into such things. Global warming, they had said. An old bacteria, dormant for two and a half million years, had been unleashed as the glaciers receded over the poles. It wasn't dangerous to humans, only affected plants: grasses and weeds and ferns. But from there it adapted. From grasses to herbivores, from herbivores to carnivores, from both to omnivores. It started like a flu, something no one actually paid attention to. Runny nose, stuffy head, the usual spiel.

Then the sufferers slowly, very slowly went insane, or at least, that's what they called it at first. Eyes bulged, teeth mashed, fingers went crooked and stiff, and then, it was as if they were possessed, attacking, groaning, tearing, eating. A few people at first. The symptoms so benign that no one cared to look into it. People travelled, went about their business, infected others, unknowingly, with a shake of a hand or a kiss. In the early days, it had taken months for the infection to really show, and then, suddenly, people in every corner of the world started showing signs. Skipped epidemic, went right into pandemic.