The Firewall cleaved the Earth, a jagged scar of flame that gnawed the heavens. It was a ribbon of molten wrath born twenty-five thousand years ago in the Purge, when the world drowned in fire and shadow. It stretched equatorially, forming an eternal ring of nuclear fury. Its roar became a ceaseless hymn that split the globe into twin realms: the Northland, where steel towers crumbled under a dying sky; and the Southland, where the wild thrived amid ash and ruin. No star pierced its shroud and no wind crossed its maw. The Firewall marked the end of one age and became the forge of another, seen by some as a god’s wrath and by others as a ghost of catastrophe.

In the Northland, the air hangs thick with the tang of rust and ozone, a graveyard breath seeping from cities clinging to the bones of ancients. Spires of glass and iron stabbed upward, their peaks shrouded in a jaundiced haze, remnants of a civilization that once tamed the atom and rode the void. Now, their lights flickered, frail as guttering candles, casting long shadows over cracked plazas where the wind keened through hollow shells. The Firewall loomed to the south, a searing wall dominating the horizon. Its amber glow bled into a sky choked with ash and vapor. The land beneath withered; soil turned to dust and rivers to sludge, its life leached by the ceaseless hum of machines straining to hold back collapse. Men and women moved like spectres, clad in patchwork suits of circuits and steel, their faces gaunt beneath visors glowing with fading glyphs. They huddled in their citadels, techno-feudal lords atop a crumbling throne. The Firewall acted as their jailer, a barrier they named with cold precision, offering a shield against a South they had forgotten. Its heat drove their engines and scorched their dreams.

Beyond the blaze, the Southland sprawled. Here, the earth pulsed wild in a relentless riot of green and blood, unshackled by the Purge’s ruin. People called this the Skyforge, a divine forge blazing in the northern sky and bathing the steppe in ceaseless dusk, all red and gold. The air thrummed with life: humid, sharp, laced with the musk of beasts and the iron tang of slaughter. Vast plains stretched outward, their grasses swaying like a sea under winds howling from jagged peaks. Jungles clawed upward, with vines strangling ancient husks of metal swallowed by root and rot. Tribes roamed here, clad in hides stitched with bone and iron. Their blades were forged in fires stoked by the Skyforge’s breath. These warriors danced to drums echoing the wall’s roar. Their camps sprawled beneath the glow, hides stretched taut over frames of scavenged steel, fires spitting sparks that mingled with those raining from the sky. The Forgefather’s wrath had birthed them, they sang; iron men risen from molten earth, clay women fired by its heat. Their lives were brutal hymns of hunt and conquest, etched in scars and blood.