Dissension

Prologue

Prologue

Everyone joked about the end of the world, but when it finally happened, no one was laughing.

December 21, 2012.

Mankind’s final day had been predicted for years, but no one had believed it would ever come. Why would they? There had been so many dates labeled “the end,” and none had yet come to pass.

When the sun rose on that fateful day, everyone made their little jokes. Just one more hoax. Street merchants started selling “I survived the apocalypse... again” T-shirts. Everybody looked around, shrugged their shoulders, and got back to what they’d been doing. The world moved on.

But the day starts at different times across the globe. This particular prophesy — this doomsday prediction — had been made by the Mayan people. It wasn’t until the sun rose in South America that the destruction began.

Previously docile fault lines began to quake. As if waking from a slumber, the earth rumbled from deep within like some ravenous beast scenting its prey, to be satisfied only by utter annihilation.

Volcanoes that had lain dormant for hundreds of years suddenly sprang into action, erupting with centuries of pent-up pressure, spewing hot geysers of acrid smoke. Rivers of magma belched out from the mouths of these angry mountains, scorching the land and devouring everything caught in their deadly flow. Thick clouds blanketed the sky, choking out the sunlight. Searing chunks of pumice rained down upon the land, burying entire cities and all their occupants in a rocky grave.

For decades — centuries, even — the Earth had been beaten and bruised, scratched and bitten by her inhabitants. It was only natural that she would fight back. And her retribution was merciless. Whole continents fragmented as fault lines deepened and separated. The surface of the earth ripped apart while its terrified inhabitants futilely attempted to escape the destruction. Nowhere was safe. Giant waves of destruction beat down upon every coast, swallowing islands whole and obliterating coastal cities on mainlands. Never before had the loss of life been so devastating.

No one was laughing now.

It was truly, utterly, the end of days.

In the aftermath, the few that remained alive were forced to band together for survival. Food was scarce; shelter was even harder to come by. People who had never conceived of a life without electricity, running water, and fast food were faced with the ultimate choice: to live, by whatever means possible... or to die.

In the ragged days that followed the destruction, many more lives were lost — or taken — in the name of survival. Those who remained were few and far between.

And not all survivors were human.

Supernatural creatures — vampires — once thought to be the stuff of myth and legend, were forced from the refuge of the shadows. With no place left to hide, their only choice for survival was to reveal themselves to those few humans who remained. Immortality gave vampires the ability to weather the storms, but their weakness to sunlight left them vulnerable and in desperate need of shelter and protection during the harsh days following the great cataclysms. Only through collaboration could both races stand the slightest chance for survival.

It was an uneasy truce at first. The vampires’ need for blood, no matter how small a dose, made them objects of hatred rather than companionship; but their ability to protect the former city-dwelling humans against other predators in the night counted greatly in their favor. Eventually, human and vampire learned to co-exist.

Slowly, as they always do, humans adapted to their newly reshaped home. Society rebuilt itself. Life continued on planet Earth and even began to flourish. Over the next hundred years, eight thriving cities rose from the ashes, and humans once again took their place as masters of the Earth.

And with that power came hubris.

Formerly friends and vital allies, the vampires quickly became targets – victims of the humans’ drive to be top of the food chain. Rumors and lies spread quickly about what vicious and cold-hearted demons the vampires truly were. Human deaths, even when the cause was not loss of blood, were blamed on vampires. Long forgotten was the help the vampires had given to their human brethren in those early days of reconstruction.

The human race came to see vampires as nothing more than criminals and outlaws. Vermin. Using the vampires’ vulnerability to sunlight and starvation, the humans turned their once-helpful protectors into slaves. Hunted down and brought to so-called justice, vampires were faced with the same brutal choice the humans had confronted a century earlier: Succumb to the will of humans, or end their days on Earth.

To live by whatever means possible... or to die.