My arms are up to the elbows in blood. That is the most terrible thing that lies in my soul.
Nikita Khrushchev
The Nuclear Crisis began and ended in a Sayan grassland over the course of fifty-eight days.
The grassland awoke on a hot, insignificant day in the beginning of the second week of November.
Sol shot into the sky and the grass burned and heaved under the oppressive weight of mid-summer beams of light and heat.
It was noon. Recess. Children came out to play. Barefoot, they ran around aimlessly, joyfully, upon the expanse of yellow-brown grass until they were called back inside by a voice from the school.
The school is - or, was - a concrete monolith in a void of dying grass.
The teacher looked oppressed. Wrinkles stretched across their thin, sallow face, from the bottom of their chin to the to the top of their forehead. They were free from the “tyranny of wage-driven servitude,” yet still cracking, suffering, toiling, under something.
Inertia, maybe, the grassland thought. An object’s resistance to change, in a way. The teacher was tired. Didn’t want to change their state of sleep: inaction, to teaching: action. Nothing beyond the simple concept of laziness is made apparent to the Grassland.
Yet nothing had changed over the last twenty years, the teacher thought. Inertia was not a distant concept to the Sayan Union; the dream of a communist utopia, it trundled on, no matter how resigned it was to decades of uneventful stagnation.
The teacher’s reflective trance was broken by columns of smoke shooting across the sky.
One - two - three - five - nine - line after line after line of translucent gray smoke streaks down the cloudless November sky; sound following the sight eight seconds after.
In a matter of seconds, panic ensues. The rampant paranoia of the Cold War had prepared the class for this single point in time.
The children ran inside; ducking under their desks while the teacher weeps. The world ends here, they think.
The grassland shrugs. No change. It has no idea what is to come.
Twelve and a half miles away from the weeping teacher and bewildered students, the rocket approached its target. At upwards of mach six, it careened into the city center, where people worked on a fateful Monday afternoon.
The reaction took place in the blink of an eye. The trinitrotoluene shell combusts, ramming the plutonium core into itself. In a microsecond, it reaches critical mass.
The reaction begins. An expanding ball of heat, wind, and radiation, encompassed the city. Wood and cloth is vaporized. Concrete is charred and brittle. Hundreds of tons of debris are flung outward in every direction. For a minute or so, a second sun was born among the people of the city of Mariteaux.
In Mariteaux, tens of thousands of people perished instantaneously. The total number of dead, as officials will later learn, is uncountable. Bodies are piled upon each other; in rivers; in squares; in empty houses. The world is silent. Mourners will come to learn there are not enough flowers in the world to pay respects to Avaya’s dead.
Saya tried to quantify the devastation anyway.
The third night after the conflict: cities begin to report their dead. The remaining military officials - with an entourage of scientists, priests, and politicians - rode in on humvees and began to evaluate the destruction with the world’s largest abacus: a million dead in Mariteaux. Another million in New Dubsloe. In Mauzell, the breadbasket of the Sayan Union, two million lives are claimed. A further three million in Avigneux. Men and women alike weep.
The world leaders - or what’s left of them - began to count the score. In nuclear war, you won by losing the least. But everybody knew, deep down, nobody won.
The dust and ash kicked up into the atmosphere, and like a child loosing sand in the shallows of a beach, clouded the atmosphere. The average temperature of Avaya, as scientists were horrified to learn, drops nine degrees centigrade in 1990. The survivors of human fury now had to confront nature’s response.
A week later, the grassland is scorched. The sandy-yellow color the shrubbery was so many days ago looked paradisal compared to the charred hue of black the grass was now. An uncharacteristic mid-November breeze flowed through the interior of the grassland.
The brutalist Sayan elementary school had done what it was intended to do. Seven days after the shockwave and there it stands, mostly unharmed.
In the school, young men huddled around the twisted corpse of a desk. Mutilated leftovers - unidentified bodies - lay outside the school. The stench, combined with the burning grass, was a miasma like nothing the men had smelled before.
Grouped around the desk, they plotted military maneuvers on a wrinkled map. On the bent pages, there were acronyms and names scrawled across the paper.
Long names, yes - they mean nothing, the burning grassland thinks. Sayan Independent Council Republics, Central Re-organization Committee; State Security Force; The Free Army - it was all bullshit. Nothing but a resurgence of tribalism, the social human’s urge to organize, civilize, conquer.
The men, after a few minutes of hushed, urgent discussion, finish speaking. Exiting the school, they addressed three or four dozen soldiers. Men and women. Children, teenagers, adults, the elderly. They were given guns, instructions, and sent to fight for whichever acronym seemed nicest.
Who cared what the war was about, anymore? How could men do this to each other? Justified questions from the grassland. Still, men organized, fought, cried, and died over the debris of the largest war in human history.
The war would continue until the thirtieth of December, of the same year. The days, hours, minutes - they stretched into eternity.
In Saya, the civil war raged on. Nobody won until six years later, when a short man calling himself Brother Clemenceau would triumph over the debris, his kingdom of the dead, and establish the State of Saya.
Their Ayan brothers would see peace much earlier - by 1991 the Rosen Commonwealth had signed a new constitution and functioned - more or less - as a real state. In West Aya, the warring states began to unite under the banner of the West Ayan Republic during the late ’90s. In the Arawad, least affected by the trivial disputes of Western men, the population surged, and millions came to starve under the weight of newfound prosperity.
The world that stumbled out of the Nuclear Crisis - and all of its grasslands - would never be the same. Historians would come to call the Crisis the most impactful event in human history. Every human, rich or poor, was affected somehow. The consumerism and excess of the 20th century died a fiery death.
Everybody lost someone, yet the world found itself no more empathetic or compassionate than it was before the Crisis.
In 2021, in what many would come to call a mockery of the postwar world, a young Rosen senator and amateur economist by the name of Genziano Noce would declare a “Renewed Cold War.” This time between the continued Rosen Commonwealth and the State of Saya.
Rivaling states continue to stockpile nuclear weapons. The world is no safer than it was. The world is no happier than it was. The world is no better than it was.
Everything had changed, yet nothing had.
It is 2053 - sixty-four years on from the war. The world is at the brink again. Men pray once more.
Glossary
Nuclear Crisis
A global nuclear and conventional conflict that took place in this world’s 1989. It led to the deaths of hundreds of millions in dozens of countries, effectively destroying the world order and rearranging it into what Avaya is now.
Avaya
The geographically alternate Earth this fictional universe is set in.
Sol
This world’s term for the sun. Similarly, “Luna” is used instead of “the Moon.”
Sayan Union
A self-proclaimed socialist state akin to the Soviet Union, which it is mostly based on. It was founded in the late 1910s and grew to become a superpower to rival the Rosen Republic and other existing imperial powers. The Sayan Union is mostly in the southern hemisphere, which is why it’s midsummer in November. Saya, as the state is colloquially called, has a savannah-like climate in much of its territory, which is why the story is partly told from the perspective of a grassland, as it characterizes the people and general region of Saya as a whole.
The Rosen Commonwealth
Essentially the central country and focus of this project. A semi-socialist state that was formed after the end of the Rosen Republic. Organized as the First Commonwealth at the time of this story, it was ruled as a one-party state and dictatorship by Julian Rybicki. Shortly after the end of the Crisis, it reorganized and ratified a new constitution, establishing the democratic and consensus-based Second Commonwealth that prevails now, in 2053.
The Cold War
Akin to its real-life counterpart, the Cold War was a period of tension, starting after the end of the Great War, between the capitalist Rosen Republic (along with the SLTO, akin to NATO) and the Sayan Union (along with the Montuon Pact, akin to the Warsaw Pact.) When the Rosen Republic collapsed (spoiler!), its successor, the Rosen Commonwealth, continued its foreign policy and ensured the Cold War would continue until the Nuclear Crisis ended.
The Sayan Civil War
The Sayan Union was rapidly deteriorating before the Nuclear Crisis, which was all but the final nail in the Union’s coffin. With a new power vacuum in Saya, a brutal multi-sided civil war was fought for six years, until Pierre Clemenceau united the country as the oligarchic State of Saya. The war was perhaps the most violent and pronounced effect of the Nuclear Crisis barring the nuclear conflict and millions died because most of the war was fought in the direct aftermath of the Crisis.
West Aya and the West Ayan Republic
West Aya is a continent between the Rosen Commonwealth and the Sayan Union. The continent was split between SLTO and Montuon Pact countries in a situation similar to Europe or Asia during the real-life Cold War. When the Rosen Republic collapsed, SLTO collapsed along with it and many member states defected to the Sayan Union or pursued non-aligned foreign policies. Many countries refused to give up Rosen nuclear weapons, which worsened the country’s situation during the Nuclear Crisis.
The West Ayan Republic was formed in the aftermath of the conflict as a confederation of West Ayan states. Nowadays, the country pursues an independent foreign policy but usually aligns with the State of Saya on geopolitical issues, further complicating the “Renewed Cold War.”
Genziano Noce
A prolific Rosen senator and economist known for his distinctive style of speech and discourse. He has been described as a strong proponent of Rosen civic nationalism and a supporter of the Rosen socialist system (Almeidaism), and is known as a great orator in the Rosen Commonwealth. In the context of the story, he is quoted in a famous speech he gave regarding the state of Rosen-Sayan relations in the early 2020s.