Attack + 4 weeks.
A smoky pall hangs over all the Flanaess, and all of Oerth's northern hemisphere.
The abandoned ruins of tens of thousands of thorps, villages, and towns gives mute testimony to the magnitude of the disaster.
Around the ruins, cattle lay dead in the burned fields.
Roads pass through great stands of burned trees, lifeless trunks and branches stark against the grey sky.
Great stands of what look like tall, black, sticks signify where forests stood, blackened ground shows where lush meadows were.
Seen from space, most of the Flanaess looks like a desert, could one see it through the pall of smoke.
Hempmonaland is little better off, it's forests ablaze from the great battles there, smoke drifting in gigantic plumes across equatorial Oerth.
Great craters, some more than 10 miles across - more than a hundred of them - adorn the Flanaess.
More than 150 more adorn other parts of Oerth.
Around these craters is nothing. Nothing at all but empty scoured rock and badlands, for 30 miles in every direction.
The Flanaess is silent of birdcalls.
There are no birds singing in the trees, just as there are no trees to sing in.
The Flanaess sees no small animals running through the underbrush.
There is no underbrush.
- - -
There are isolated places where the reality above is not true.
In part of the Amedio Rainforest.
In Sterich and Ket.
In most of the great Vesve Forest.
In most of Adri Forest.
In western Ahlissa.
In the easternmost part of the Thillronian Peninsula.
In the Lendore Isles.
Across the Hellfurnaces, Crystalmists, Barrier Peaks, Yatils, Glorioles, Rakers, and Corusk Mountains, where the mountain valleys were sheltered from the heat and the blasts.
In a hundred small isolated places.
Here. There.
There are surviving woods, surviving plants, surviving birds and animals.
- - -
The Shade are gone, but the region of Shadow Throne, and all the region around it, including the Nyr Dyv and northern Wolly Bay, remain dead.
They will remain dead for centuries.
The Blood Waste remains.
10th level magic is no longer containing the sickness.
There is no magic short of 11th level magic that has any hope, now, of containing the sickness.
There are mounting signs of further, and much greater trouble than the Red Goo, across all of the Flanaess.
Earthquakes.
Lava flows, volcanoes becoming active.
Dormant volcanoes coming to life.
Volcanoes appearing where no volcanoes ever were.
In some areas, people notice the land is sinking, and becoming wet.
In other places, the land is rising, and becoming drier.
Wild Magic storms are a regular part of the climate now.
However, the climate itself is not regular.
The prevailing winds have disappeared.
Freak cold waves are striking southward.
Although it is only late summer, Veluna City is buried in snow which is not melting in the frigid cold.
In the Thillronian Peninsula, an enormous tropical heatwave of unheard of proportions is hitting that subarctic land.
In the mountains, the glaciers are melting, and flash floods are occurring on every river.
In the oceans, the ocean currents are shifting.
They are also bringing to shore tens of thousands of bodies of merfolk, tritons, and sea elves, along with sahuagin and others, killed by the shock from the Barrage.
Not to mention countless millions of dead fish.
The oceans stink of rot.
- - -
In the midst of this ruin, feverish activity is going on amongst those called the humans, humanoids, and demihumans.
Cities of stone and concrete are going up.
New fortresses and citadels are being built, grim and hunched against the sullen sky.
New roads are being laid.
New waterways are being made.
Most of the people of the Flanaess now live in the new cities, by necessity.
As there are 170 million beings in the Flanaess, there are a lot of cities being constructed.
Grimly and determinedly, men and women are putting back up communication lines, communication towers, pipelines protected by magic.
Factories that survived the Barrage are going back into production.
New factories are being built.
Great fortified shelters are being built, capable of withstanding enemy attacks or further natural disasters.
The whole of the Flanaess is a fever of activity, as it's people work at a frantic pace to reestablish their infrastructure.
What they are building, what is rising from the ashes of the world that was, is entirely new.
It does not look anything like the old world.
It does not feel like the old world.
It does not sound like the old world.
It is new, coldly efficient, methodical, ruthlessly effective, and industrial in nature.
A paved road may not look very good, but it moves vehicles and troops very well, be it through burned fields or dead forests.
A tenement building, made of steel and concrete and reinforced with Walls of Force, may not look very nice (nor is it necessarily a nice place to live in) but it does house people and shelter them from the elements.
Processed food may not be pleasant to look at, much less tasty, but it keeps one alive.
Government by the military is a hard government, but it works.
The laws are harsh and punishment is swift (and almost universally lethal) but law and order are maintained.
Step by step, the Dark Union puts back together it's infrastructure, and in so doing puts itself back into a position to proactively attack or defend itself.
Those lands conquered by the Dark Union are brutally reorganized and their populations put to work in reconstruction.
In the Pomarj, the humanoids there pull themselves back up out of the abyss.
In Varnaith, Zindia, the Empire of the Yuan-Ti, Aaqa, Orcreich, and the Celestial Imperium, the damage was less.
Although these nations are in full mourning for the terrible war losses, life is at least semi-normal there.
There are still forests, crops, birds, and animals, there.
In Lyrn, the grim reality of the Flanaess has come home, and that nation is down, unable to pick itself up again, probably permanently broken.
In Ishtarland, there was no damage, and they are wondering what happened in the other lands.
In the sea nations, under the waves, the sea-elves, tritons, merfolk, and sahuagin are grimly burying their dead, and trying to rebuild from the massive blast through the water.
In the Underdark, the evil races cackle in glee, knowing the surface-dwellers got just what they deserved.
And finally, in the many, many lands held by the Alliance of Oerth, a desperate struggle is on to duplicate what the Dark Union is already doing.
Cities are under reconstruction, infrastructure is under repair, fortifications and shelters are being created, ingenuity is at work.
But it takes time.
Crucial time.
Time the Alliance of Oerth may or may not have.