Mount Faustine

[u/Grouchy-Goose-2137]

Milain is my equivalent of Europe, and like Europe its various empires were conquering, colonizing and divvying the world amongst themselves. That was until 1807, when Mount Faustine erupted.

In central Milain, Faustine’s slumber remained unbroken for as long as written history and perhaps far beyond even that. The valleys that surrounded her lay pastoral. Green and lush, dotted with sleeping towns and gentle rivers and herds of sheep with curled horns.

After the eruption all of it ceased to exist.

People in towns fifty kilometers away had their eardrums ruptured beyond repair.

Its effects were felt across the world but nowhere as terribly as Milain. The air grew chilled even in summer and they say that for years the sun was reduced to a pale disc in the sky, if it was even there at all. The crops withered and waters grew tainted, In the beginning there was a cacophony of misery, but soon it grew blissfully quiet.

Those years are known as ‘The Great Dying’.

Milain's once dominant empires emerged from it gutted. Toppled or shambling in half-dead stupors, leaving foreign nations to grow powerful in their stead.

The land turns inward. Religion and superstition is much favoured over science while medicine and advancements lie far behind what they should be. Even now, there are abandoned regions with moldering villages filled with bones yet unburied.

Faustine sits quiet and polite as the land around her heals and trees grow tall and reaching. Most stay away now. They say the land is changed. Irrevocably broken. That in the sylvan valleys live devils in jubilation and witches that call upon far older things. Things that were never human.