The History of Terra Ascending

The dawn of the 22nd century was marked not by triumph, but by unraveling. The twin catastrophes of economic implosion and total war shattered the old world order with terrifying speed.

The Second Great Depression & the Second American Civil War

In 2103, the United States, bloated with debt from decades of mismanagement, endless foreign entanglements, and failing infrastructure, defaulted on its national obligations. Confidence collapsed overnight. Banks shuttered. Food lines stretched for miles. Cities became battlegrounds between desperate civilians, overextended police forces, and increasingly fragmented National Guard units.

In the chaos, old wounds reopened. Secessionist movements, thought long dead, reignited. California, Texas, and a New England coalition declared autonomy. Militias, corporations, and warlords carved up the interior. Civil war erupted, not cleanly drawn north vs. south, but as a patchwork of ideological, racial, religious, and economic fault lines cracking apart.

The Eastern Onslaught

Sensing weakness, the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), a Russian-led bloc of Eastern nations, launched a brutal invasion of Eastern Europe. With startling speed, the modernized CIS armies overran NATO forces in Ukraine, the Baltics, Poland, and the Balkans, toppling governments and replacing them with puppet regimes. They soon turned their ambitions toward western Europe.

In the south, a new threat rose. A radical prophet emerged in the Arabian Peninsula, uniting splintered Islamist factions with a terrifying charisma. Declaring a new global jihad, his followers swept through the Middle East, conquering Mecca, Jerusalem, Cairo, and Tehran. Africa and the Indian subcontinent followed in a wave of fire and fanaticism. Though ideologically strained, the jihadists and CIS formed a tenuous alliance, splitting Eurasia between them like carrion.

The Last Stand at the Rhine

Isolated and overwhelmed, General Elizabeth Sanderson, supreme commander of American forces in NATO, orchestrated a brilliant but harrowing strategic retreat across Europe. Abandoned by a paralyzed Washington and cut off from resupply, her army fell back step by step, fortifying cities only to evacuate them days later. Her last stand at the Rhine River became a legend: outnumbered five-to-one, her troops held for weeks before the line buckled. But it was enough time for the Western allies to play their trump card: the Minerva Satellite Array.

Across the globe, a desperate gamble played out. American Marines stationed in Okinawa, acting on outdated orders, launched a bold amphibious assault into Siberia, opening a second front. But the US Pacific Fleet was devastated, leaving the Marines stranded and hunted in hostile territory.

The Betrayal from Orbit

Amid the ruin, hope came from the stars. The Minerva Satellite Array, a joint UK-French-Italian orbital defense network, was deployed in secret. Designed to intercept hypersonic missiles and electronic warfare platforms, it activated in the final days of the war. It neutralized dozens of CIS nuclear warheads aimed at European capitals and halted the advance into France and Italy, pounding CIS units from orbit.

But Minerva had limits. And politics. It was never meant to defend the disintegrating United States. Russian warheads slipped through, striking Washington D.C., Norfolk, San Diego, and dozens of military installations. The Atlantic Fleet was annihilated, and the US command structure went dark.

To Sanderson and her surviving troops, the deployment of Minerva was a betrayal. Europe had saved itself and left America to burn.

Ceasefire and Division

With both sides bloodied and overextended, a ceasefire was signed in Geneva. In a bitter compromise, the Americans agreed to return captured Siberian territory in exchange for safe passage of their stranded Marines to Europe.

Eastern Europe was carved up. Scandinavia, Germany, Poland, Romania, the Balkans, Ukraine, and Belarus were either annexed or vassalized by the CIS. Western Europe, refusing to fall, rallied under a new flag: the Western European Confederation (WEC). It included the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, the Low Countries, and parts of Switzerland.

Sanderson and her “American Contingent” remained in exile, hosted but not trusted. She vowed to return to the homeland, to restore order, but she had no navy, no air force, and no allies. European leaders, eager to keep her troops in place as a buffer force, exaggerated the destruction back in the States, painting the US mainland as uninhabitable.

The Great Exodus

Amid the chaos, the elite made their move. The world’s wealthiest—trillionaires, corporate titans, rogue technocrats—fled Earth. In vast colony ships, launched from private spaceports, they escaped into the stars, bringing with them geneticists, engineers, artists, and AI experts. Their destinations were secret. Their motives, unclear. The starports were destroyed as the colony ships left. Some ships shot nuclear warheads at Earth, hoping to further cripple the ones left behind, lest they one day follow them into space.

But their absence marked the final death knell of the old world. Earth had been bled dry, and those with the means had abandoned her.

The General Walks Away

By 2107, the war was over, but peace remained elusive. General Elizabeth Sanderson, once a symbol of resistance and honor, became a political inconvenience. The Western European Confederation, bloated with competing agendas and fraying alliances, had no room for a war hero who refused to play politics.

Disillusioned and exhausted, Sanderson resigned her commission and vanished from public life. She purchased a modest estate in the Scottish Highlands, far from the smoke-filled conference rooms of Paris and Edinburgh. There, amid rolling hills and cold, clean air, she raised sheep and kept to herself. Her departure marked the end of the American military presence as a unified force.

The “American Contingent,” scattered across Europe and increasingly impoverished, had no leader now. They scrounged for their next meals, begged for money. Some turned to banditry or formed private military companies.

Europe’s Fractured Debate

In Paris, the leaders of the Western European Confederation argued over the future. Victory had come at a cost. Population centers lay devastated, economies strained, and refugee crises exploded across the continent. Yet each member nation had a different vision for what came next.

Reactionaries in Italy and Spain called for a restoration of monarchies, arguing that traditional power structures would bring order. Modernists from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands demanded a parliamentary democracy, something nimble enough to survive the new age. Isolationists in Switzerland and Portugal proposed dissolving the Confederation entirely, believing the alliance had served its purpose.

Eventually, a compromise was reached: a new governing body, simply called The Assembly, would be formed. Each nation would send representatives proportionate to its surviving population, and the Assembly would meet permanently in Paris. Americans had no official representation.

The UK’s Bitter Resentment

The United Kingdom, having borne the brunt of both CIS and jihadist strikes, emerged from the war a shell of its former self. London was cratered. Entire cities in the Midlands were radioactive exclusion zones. Millions were dead.

The UK delegation protested the population-based representation formula, arguing it punished them for their sacrifices. Worse, the American Contingent—tens of thousands of soldiers, engineers, and displaced families—were excluded entirely, not even counted as residents of Britain despite living on its soil.

The British press erupted in outrage. Riots broke out in the streets of Manchester and Glasgow, demanding fair representation or withdrawal from the Confederation.

The fragile Confederation sat on the brink of civil war.

The illusion of a new world order began to rot from within. Across the globe, empires fractured, and nations fell. Strange new powers emerged, clawing for dominance in a dying world ravaged by disease and nuclear fallout. 

The Dragon Stirs: China Takes Taiwan

Having remained strategically neutral during World War III, China emerged bruised but intact. Its economy, propped up by slave labor and military-industrial output, allowed it to bide its time while the West tore itself apart.

In 2108, that time came. The People’s Liberation Navy launched a full-scale assault on Taiwan, using hypersonic missiles, AI-guided drones, and amphibious walkers. Weakened by global chaos and its great protector, the United States, no longer in play, Taiwan fell in less than two weeks. The international response was limited to condemnations and symbolic sanctions from fractured governments. None of which had the will or means to enforce them.

Beijing declared Taiwan fully integrated. There would be no more discussion. China, being the world’s sole remaining superpower, turned its gaze outward, ready to take advantage of its neighbors’ weakness.

Australia and India Fall

The ripple effects of global disorder swept across the Pacific. In Australia, years of climate disasters, refugee influxes, and failed economic reforms culminated in complete governmental collapse. The outback became a no-man’s-land of warlords and tribal enclaves. The coastal cities, half-flooded and lawless, were controlled by gangs or corporate enclaves clinging to former ports.

India, already devastated by the jihadist invasion and nuclear strikes in the north, experienced a catastrophic population collapse. Disease, famine, and ethnic violence swept through the subcontinent. Government control evaporated. In some regions, medieval caste systems reasserted themselves. In others, roving religious armies enforced brutal theocracy.

The CIS Crumbles

The Commonwealth of Independent States, overstretched and devastated by war, collapsed under its own weight. Ethnic tensions, economic collapse, and regional militias shattered the alliance. Former Soviet republics, long used as CIS buffer zones, declared independence or were taken by new powers. Warlords, separatists, and cult-leaders now ruled territory once claimed by Moscow.

In the chaos, a new force emerged in the west: the Deutch Republic, a nationalist, semi-technocratic regime born from remnants of northern Germany, Denmark, and parts of the Netherlands.  It founded the Northern Confederation. Most of Scandinavia and the remnants of Poland joined the confederation, looking for protection from external threats.

The Rhineland Betrayal

In 2110, desperate to avoid another continent-wide war, the WEC ceded territory in the Rhineland to the rising Northern Confederation. France, still smarting from the scars of occupation and CIS bombardments, viewed the move as a betrayal and cowardice. French nationalists staged mass protests in Paris, denouncing the WEC Assembly and threatening secession.

Though bloodshed was avoided, trust within the WEC fractured deeply. The Northern Confederation wasted no time consolidating power, pushing eastward to conquer several former CIS territories, using drone warfare and a revived conscription model to absorb vulnerable regions.

Spain Breaks Away

By 2111, Spain, isolated, impoverished, and culturally alienated from the Paris Assembly, left the Western European Confederation. Within months, it signed a mutual defense and trade pact with China, granting Chinese corporations and military advisors access to Iberian ports and infrastructure. This shocked WEC leaders, many of whom saw it as the first of many potential major defections to the Eastern Sphere.

Mexico Rises

In North America, with the United States fractured and unable to resist, Mexico surged northward, claiming large swathes of the American Southwest, including Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Texas and California. These regions, largely autonomous or lawless since the Civil War, fell quickly to the better-organized Mexican forces, who positioned themselves as liberators. Most welcomed the stability brought by the Mexican government.

Simultaneously, Mexico consolidated control over most of Central America, uniting the region through a mixture of military force, political marriages, and cartel-backed strongmen.

The world took notice. Mexico had gone from a peripheral actor to a rising regional empire, one with something most others lacked: momentum.

South America Burns

The rest of the Western Hemisphere fared worse. South America disintegrated into civil wars, narco-states, and corporate enclaves. Only a handful of coastal regions in Brazil retained any sense of order, primarily thanks to fortified trade hubs and the remnants of a semi-functioning navy.

Amazonia, once the planet’s green lung, became a wasteland of black markets, warlords, and roving religious cults. Deforestation intensified. Climatic shifts from the nuclear intensifying nuclear winter left large swathes of former jungle as arid deserts.

The world was dying. All humanity could do was fight over the scraps.