The Fire That Forged Us

We don’t measure time the way they used to. Dates and calendars lost meaning when the sky split open and the world came undone. But we do mark one thing: the Fall. That’s where everything starts now and time begins again, in a new age.

The Fall wasn’t a day—it was a season of endings. Some say it was a war. Others say it was punishment from the Maker, our god, who had long watched us twist His gifts into weapons and wonders that we did not deserve. The skies were blackened. People burned, vanished, or simply… stopped being people. The Dark swallowed the world. We don’t know what triggered it, only that what came before ended in fire, ash, and silence.

Camp Hope rose from the bones of that silence.

Thirteen years after the Fall, a small group of survivors found one another in the shattered ruins of what used to be Albany. They gathered in the shadow of a half-collapsed hospital, where old tech still buzzed faintly in the depths of cracked labs and dust-choked care units. They were engineers, medics, scavengers, believers—and they were desperate. But they had one thing left: the will to try again.

They built Camp Hope out of wreckage. Steel beams bent by plasma blasts became shelters. Broken bots were reprogrammed into laborers, scouts, or sentries. From time to time, a survivor would return from a scavenging run with a miracle—medical nanites that still worked, solar cores that still charged, a sliver of working exo-armor or even a tunable laser rifle, blinking like it remembered war. We patch and we pray. That’s our way now.

We believe in the Maker—not the corporations that claimed His name before, nor the synthetic gods of the old empires, but the real Maker, the one who speaks in the wind, in the DNA, and in the dreams of the faithful. He walked with us through the ruins. He showed us how to begin again. His story is older than the Fall, but we understand it now in a way the old world never could.

The Church of Hope guides us, rooted in faith and tempered by need. They teach that the Maker grieved when we forgot Him. That He made the world again through us, not for us. That we are the stewards of second chances.

Not everything is easy. We ration food and light. We send out scavengers to map the edges of our safe zones. Bandits roam the wilds, and worse things—creatures twisted by the Dark or by the sins of the old world—lurk just beyond the reach of our sentries.

But we survive.

Camp Hope is not just a place. It’s a promise. A reminder that even in the wake of our greatest failure, we did not vanish. We remember the Fall. We live with its scars. But we build anyway.

Because we still believe in tomorrow.

And we believe the Maker does too.