Dispatches from a melancholy future.

• The metal angels provided wisdom and counsel to human rulers until they rusted in the forty-year rain.
• All wizards eventually develop anisocoria from prolonged exposure to magic.
• There are seven true sages and an uncountable litany of false wisdoms. Few can distinguish the real from the counterfeit.
• The Ambergris Republics grow fat and wealthy on the new nectar of whale oil, giving rise to a new class of mariner-industrialists and an austere ideology of progress.
• The whitegrass prairies, irradiated for millennia, have healed. Enterprising sodbusters and voracious ranchers claim the vast open spaces for themselves. A litany of tiny smallholder-republics spring into being on the once-deserted steppe.
• The cultivation of greyroot, a tough and tasteless (but hardy and calorie-filled) vegetable has led to a population boom in the Sanguine Despotate. A new government of Malthusian extremists conduct secret purges of the terrified peasantry.
• Nobody crosses the Smoking Mountains. Beyond that frontier lie the lands of the oncemen and their feral gods.
• The MACHINE has been activated. Shutdown is impossible. Repeat: Shutdown is impossible. The MACHINE has been activated. Initiate evacuation immediately. Calculations show safe distance to be thirty miles. Evacuation must commence immediately. All organic lifeforms within 5 miles of zero-point are already lost and must be contained or destroyed. The MACHINE has been activated.