To those who find this scroll, heed my words. I, Balthazar Caro, the last sane man on this damned rock we know as Terra Finis, have created a record of our baseness and depravity. Terra Finis—the Last Earth! Would that this name were true, for what the rabid dogs who call themselves men have done here has shown that they deserve no future, no descendants to inherit their legacy of horror. Every part of this diseased boil we call a world has become host to its own, unique nightmare.
The Northern Dark Confederacy looms over the north, the vile cultists of Divisionism working their dark rituals to bring the doom of humanity. By the last command of their prophet Mamoud, all Divisionists must work to satiate the Restless Spirit by ending the lives of all humans, so that their souls can once more be reabsorbed into the writhing godhead they were ripped apart from at the beginning of time. If it was not for their constant warring among themselves over whether the deaths should be with or without pain, they might have already achieved their deranged goal and granted us all some measure of respite.
On the Tudor Plain, the United Extractivist Federation has almost ceased to exist outside the minds of its wizened merchant princes. Having reduced all the myriad experiences of man to the single factor of increasing profit, they have devoted all their activity to the arcane rites of Mammon that make the green line tick ever higher. Outside, the great furnaces lie cold as the abandoned peasantry butcher each other with knives for the right to feast on the last remaining slices of stale bread.
The fields of the Western Frontier Aggressorate are drenched in blood as the Great Clans war against each other without end, pausing only to launch meaningless crusades into their neighbors to satisfy their twisted laws of honor. For those that win glory in the eyes of the Great Father Cristobal Rob there is no treasure or respite, only a chance to commit ever greater acts of butchery and finally claim the mantle of the AllClan, with the right to wage eternal war against the universe.
Down south in the nether hemisphere, the Southern Ochlocracy continues its descent into madness. The rulers have declared that all things are permitted, and no man may be restrained, resulting in the common man becoming a murderous liar and thief, only interacting with others at the point of a sharpened blade. Those who would attempt to use their so-called freedom to change this system find there is an unwritten law, as the vampiric thought police of the Order of the Falcon slay any who even think of political matters.
In the savage oriental abyss of the Mekong [The remainder of this entry has been redacted for the purposes of good taste. We at Dream Pod 9 reject the idea that any group of people is better or worse than any other based on their ethnic background, and oppose racism in all its forms. Any stereotypical depictions of people of Asian ancestry in DP9 products were the result of people who are no longer working at the company, and will be corrected in future material.]
In the Inhumanist Alliance, the study of eugenics and the psychic powers of the hidden mind have produced a new, monstrous breed of triptych human. The Perceptors, with their bulging craniums, are the only ones capable of reason, but can do little else to the point that their frames are stunted and withered. When they must deign to interact with the physical world, they use the dark psionic arts to remotely operate the Protectors and Commoners, both warped by genetic craft into inhuman forms specialized only for violence or labor, no trace of human thought in their dull animal eyes.
Above the reeking swamps of the Fallen Sun Emirates, corpulent Emirs delight in unrestrained pleasures of all kinds, but would not lift a finger to do any task of their own accord. All labor for their sadistic pleasures is done by the Shahjahlin, a vast underclass with no rights other than to work themselves to their deaths in bondage. A few may trade this worthless life for the promise of a quick death in the arena, where they will become grist for the mill of the Emirs’ endless cycle of brutal blood-sport.
The one hope for Terra Finis, if it can be called that, is the Contemptuous Extermination Force. Come from distant Terra, they have judged the horrors arisen in the wake of man’s profusion into the void and rightly determined that they should not exist. Their crusade to cleanse the universe with holy fire is carried out by the SLAGs (Symbiotically Loaded Artificial Grenadiers), perfectly designed purple warriors with nought in their hearts but righteous hate for the unclean. Sadly, their attempts to purge this world have been subverted by its innate corruption, and many SLAGs have strayed from their righteous mission to become but a few more vile inhabitants of the godless place. What I would give for them to extinguish the rest of this land in the way they did with that vile pustule, War River.
One may seek to flee Terra Finis for the other worlds to which mankind has spread its hideous tendrils, but all that awaits there is new distillations of terror. Across the ochre wastelands of Constancy, the demon city of Sodom sprawls out, ever-expanding as it pulls man and machine alike into its slavering technoorganic maw. In the floating cities above the poisoned blood-seas of Laputa, debased genetic monstrosities torment their cetacean slaves. The men of the blasted atomic wasteland of Dystopia eke out a soulless existence in their automated vault-cities while sending automaton legions to scour what remains of the world’s life in the name of ancient grudges. As the thick air of Nod becomes too boiling to survive, its barbarian populace retreats further in carnal decadence and the pleasures of pain.
Further afield, in the worm-infested valleys of Babylon, mindless bodies ceaselessly toil, their free will stripped of them by the Mind Machines of the polar overlords in the name of their own security. The teeming masses of Abroad are corralled into pens like swine, their miserable and stunted existence punctuated only by spasms of orgiastic murder against anyone seen as deviant. Beneath the shadowed mountains of Svartolfheim, the cast-offs and failures who could not withstand the rigors of Examination are slaughtered en masse by the Wilde Jagd for no purpose other than to improve their killing technique. Only the inhabitants of Cape Bonavista know some measure of peace—the peace of the grave, as the last colonists not condemned to tumorous demise by radiation were devoured by carnivorous flora.
I tell you of these horrors not in the hope that you will find succor, because there is none. I seek only your comprehension, to rip the blessed membrane of ignorance from your eyes so that you may share in this black knowledge and suffer as I have! For there is no respite to be found either on this blasted earth or the sickening blackness above; the grinding wheel of the universe crushes us all in the end under its infinite weight, masticating our feeble bodies in its serrated protrusions. So come! See what you cannot unsee and learn what you cannot unlearn! We are all but fleeting creatures of flesh, soon to be torn apart by the teeth of that Heavy Gear!
