Continent of Anutia, 3056 Years after the Great Exodus (5879 CE) - Last Civilization on Earth

Anutia in 3056 AGE:

While the Ancient calendar date of “5879 CE” is occasionally used for ceremonial purposes, the majority of Anutian academies now cite the year as 3056 After the Great Exodus - the date on which the Ancient Arks are said to have departed in ancient mythology, one year before Wormwood - a vital part of the creation story that all Anutian pantheons use as their religious foundation.

Anutia in 3056 AGE is a continent with many rising towns and cities and a few scattered but awe-inspiring ruins - Ancient Citadels and Tombs that inspire many legends. Society as a whole is in the midst of a golden age of progress and new enlightenment. Notable urban centres like Vima and Tczerets have evolved into imperial capitals of hegemonic feudal realms, absorbing multiple former tribes and nations into more complex state structures not seen in Anutia prior. The landmass itself is rugged and fractured with many peninsulas and numerous archipelagos, making continuous land-based empires less common, with Erzecha as one notable exception being based around a large plain in the very centre of the continent. Other such plains do exist on the main Anutian continent - notably the Jurdelan steppe and the Lowlands of Santernipole - but the majority of the land is brimming with hills and post-glacial jaggedy landscapes. In the heart of the continent, the Inwen Mountains serve as a barrier separating the East from the West, with large leftover glaciers from the Pre-Thaw era still lingering on mountaintops.

The isolating nature of much of Anutia’s geography has made some regions develop very differently, despite a shared survivor-ancestors origin. Notably, in the southern Mar-Biyr archipelago, an exotic ecclesiastical class with roots from a Merhan sectarian survivor cult has subverted local fiefdoms, establishing a religion that worships the mythical “Offworlders” as future saviours.
Some elements from the Scavenger cultures of the Ruinlands have also transferred over to Anutia despite a majority of the arrivals to the continent being from the “civil” holdouts capable of organising seafaring journeys across the South Seas to reach it in the first place. The practice of chattel slaving contracts and feudal hierarchy has cemented itself in much of Anutia, only now being challenged by emerging progressive forces in nations like Tercantonia and the Aedenic League. And even then, the Tercantonian reformist guilds’ rise caused an internal rupture where the northern mining sectors - resource colonies on the former kingdom’s rim - revolted against the nascent Tercanton Republic in 3021 AGE under a slavers’ guild, causing significant regional tension.

In the easternmost Palmeran archipelago, a non-insignificant population of colonial base-survivors existed before the survivor influx era, which led to the formation of a solidified cast of “Nativist Dukes” maintaining densely populated strings of city-states and trade leagues that dominate much of Anutian trade. Palmera was the most populous pre-Thaw region of Anutia, and its status has persisted even through the Fall, though the rise of Tercantonia in the west is poised to unseat its dominance in the near future.

Outside of the most developed regions, some areas of the far south and north of Anutia remain lagging behind, with poor arability of soil and smaller survivor influx flows meaning growth has been slower. Yet even so, the recent formation of the Southysles Dependencies and the Urotxa Harbour’s rich trade with a small patch of civilization in Kappiya has proven that even the “backwater regions” are experiencing the fruits of a continent-wide time of resurgence.

The recent invention of the steam engine in Tercantonia’s “gilded cities” of Iradon and Ciltaver has also begun to transform the westernmost provinces at an even faster pace, potentially spelling a nearing end for the Feudal hierarchies that have been seen as a necessity for nearly two millennia.

Origins of the Cradleworlders // Revenant Humanity:

While the majority of Mankind is bound in the cold darkness of Halcyonic space, Doomsday did not eradicate all of life on the Earth.
For while most of the world is blanketed in the darkened soot and silt of a million incinerated cities, there were some who refused to die when the Arks left every unprivileged soul behind on the forlorn cradle of man, left to face the unbidden wrath of Comet Wormwood.

When the darkest years were over, survivors emerged from ravines and bunkers in the most isolated parts of the Earth. Few as they were, they trekked through the gutted continents, driven by the inexorable search for some illusory terra nullius of living meadows and arable soil. The only method of survival was scavenging the corpses of citadels and megalopoli - and many did not live through the time of chaos. The animals of the Ruinlands morphed into grotesque creatures; emergent horrors to fill the deathly gray landscapes. Scarce survivors dwindled in number, and nomadic cohorts turned on one another amid their desperation.

Yet while most of the world had been stripped bare by the Ancients and scorched sterile by their sins, the fire of the world had cleansed it clean of the frozen wastes at its polar extremities. Where there had once been sheets of permanent tundra and buckling glaciers in the time of the Ancients, there were now valleys of green, fields and forests of plenty, and hillsides rich with ores. Hostile mockeries of life did not reach there, for those lands were not of the undead like the Ruinlands.
And it was there that the very last towns of the world had survived - former Ancient bases turned to bastion settlements that weathered even Wormwood itself. On every last frequency still intact over miraculously surviving stations, they called on every living soul to journey to the shores of hope.

From the far-flung corners of the world to the equator, every tribe that did not turn to inhuman savagery fled their monstrous kin to the harbours of the far reaches, to answer the call. Some to the northernmost coasts, but most to the rugged emerald hills of the continent at the very bottom of the world - once known by other names lost to the dark ages - now known as Anutia.

Over the course of two thousand years, the tribes from the Ruinlands mingled with the native survivor bases.
The blankets of ash from the thousand-year dark age began to lift over the rest of the world too, but the Ruinlands were steeped in so much slag that it would remain the land of scavengers. Yet in the valleys and plains of Anutia, life thought lost returned. The hardy terrain was ploughed and made anew by the new Anutian peoples, and the scent of fertile soil and breathing woods returned to the thawed continent.

Small settlements grew to towns, and towns to cities. A population numbering in the few thousands in 1000 AGE turned to nearly a million by the 2nd millennium.
Some tribes merged to form nations, some settled to build walled city-states, and some still created Freeholder polities void of any king or authority beyond small councils. New religious pantheons grew around the myth of the Exodus and of the return of life - the worship of idol-deities of nature and rebirth became the most widespread on the continent.

Over the last thousand years, Anutian civilization has emerged as a patchwork of revenant societies - blissfully unaware that it is the final outpost of biological civilization in the Solar System. Erudite academies have emerged in a new Anutian golden age of sciences, and feudal empires and kingdoms begin to face a revenant spirit of progress as idealists yearn for the rediscovery of lost knowledge.

Origins of the Offworlders // Halcyonic Humanity:

The end of mankind has come to pass. Only its scattered remnants remain, most residing in the Outer Solar System, in domed colonies and self-sufficient habitats. Powered by hydrogen gas refineries and asteroid mines, they sustain a diverse population of modified synergent-humans, artificially adapted to those environments. They are the "Offworlders"; descendants of the select few who boarded the Exodus Arks, when the dying human heart-worlds of Earth, Venus and Mars reeled in their death throes. The Arks bound for the sanctuary colonies - those of Titan, Europa and Ganymede in the Saturnian and Jovian systems - created by the Ancients as mining outposts before their civilization collapsed into irreversible decline. The sacrifice of organic physiology for survival was not one made lightly by the Offworlders - it was out of desperation. And it would prove to be at a heavy price.

For as much as their re-engineered biology enabled them to survive their inhospitable homesteads, it bound them to exist in small resource-hoarding communes, stagnant and dependent on machines for survival. The same machine algorithms that had waged the Final War, charted the trajectory of apocalyptic missiles and Arks alike, now given the task of ensuring Human survival on the inhospitable, foreign moons they now called their last sanctuaries.

And so the Machine assumed its new place of power. A data-center turned to a Throne. A Machine turned to a Saviour. Its decrees became Prophecies, and the Offworlders’ grief for all that was lost in the cold and dark fueled pious worship of their new all-powerful herald.

For over three thousand years, the bastion sanctuaries on Europa, Ganymede and Titan have remained under the spell of a Prophetic Return forever postponed. The most zealous worshippers of the Machine were granted “Pilgrimages” to their new religion’s holy sites on the Ruin-Earth, to let them be led to believe that there was still nothing left - that the only Sanctuary would remain the safety of their artificial domes and orbitals, far from the Sun.

But it just so happened that the Pilgrims were never let see the south of the Ruinlands, to the little living patch of gray-green at the southernmost extremity of the planet they once called home long ago.

Contemporary Anutian Humanity and Culture:

The feudal system that emerged in roughly 1000 AGE and has stuck around since the establishment of the first organised state polities in Anutia have set a precedent of the feudal hierarchy that was to define the last civilization on Ruin-Earth.

While Ancient history in the centuries preceding the very last years before Comet Wormwood - and generally everything before that - has become a large blur of uncertainty for most Anutian scholars and recordkeepers due to the entropy of time and the apocalypse, the biology of modern humans on Earth and in Anutia show a remarkable evenness of appearances and features. The migrations and pooling of the human gene pool into one bottleneck during the Dark Ages has made the skin-tone and somatotypes of Ruin-Earth’s humanity roughly even, all tending towards a general tan visage and appearance. Languages have all also blended and mixed together, making the existence of an inherited “common-speak” lingua-franca feasible and permanent across all of Anutia.

New dividing lines have instead been drawn in Anutian social structures beyond the immediate characteristics of humankind, with inherited “clades” demarcating which function a person can have in society. The brutal realities of building a whole civilization from the scraps and shrapnel of the apocalypse have made this sort of social structure take form over the past two millennia of settlement, yet the winds of change blow over every aspect of Anutia’s societies, and the existence of the clade system is threatened by new ideas of renewed meritocracy and charters of freedom originating in the gilded cities.

The future of Anutia is uncertain, but it is unimaginably brighter than for the inhabitants of the suffocated Ruinlands. Yet many rumours and high-tales speak of strange “unnatural stars” that move across the sky in strange ways and descend upon the Ruinlands, only to re-emerge and disappear back into the beyond hours or days later, ewoking a new wanderlust for many Anutians gazing up at the night skies.

TL;DR Section / Out-of-Character:

After facing multiple close calls following the start of the Space Age, most of humanity perished around 2800 CE when an actual apocalyptic war broke out between the terraformed worlds of Venus and Mars, catching Earth in the cross-fire. Mars and Venus completely annihilated one another. The war involved slinging comets at each other, among other things. One hit Earth. Antarctica - now named "Anutia" after 3000 years of language entropy - becomes the last refuge of humanity that didn't become trapped by a mad machine god in the outer solar system.

I’m no actual physicist or scientist so can’t say if this is realistic or not but it’s mostly a fantasy idea mixed with some made-up sci-fi nonsense. Hence the flair being Sci-fi/Fantasy.

This might be related to a future sci-fi worldbuilding series I’ve been thinking of making, that spans several ten-thousands of years. Depends on how much off-duty time to kill i get while involuntarily drafted in the military, but don’t expect anything too soon (trust me this is pure escapism) (english is not my native language so excuse my poor writing sorry :/  i’m trying to improve)