PROLOGUE TO WAR

The Aldenian War, known simply as “The War” to most natives of the planet, transformed every aspect of life for every person who experienced it. At its climax, more than 100 million males and females, humans and humanimals, were in uniform. By its end, more than 40 million soldiers of the world’s various militaries had died, and a staggering excess of 80 million civilians, many of them females and children, perished-- utterly destroyed by the calculations of war. So extreme was the bloodshed, and so widespread, that the true number of the dead will never be known.

The war was a specter impossible to avoid. It was the upheaval and reconstruction of an entire way of life, from everyday action to the fundamental aspects of faith and the existence of God. It touched every male, female, and child in every home in every community on Alden.

The war stemmed from peoples’ oldest flaws; the need for control, the need for vengeance—from greed, ignorance, and bigotry. And it was only broken by peoples’ virtues; courage, persistence, selflessness, and compassion— from togetherness and a craving for freedom. Combined with incomprehensible savagery, the two at times so closely and bitterly fought as to become indistinguishable.

Like most wars, the onset of the Aldenian War, its theaters, and its acts, was foreseeable, but like most wars the populations involved found themselves engulfed in affairs that they were simply unprepared for. At the greatest fathomable cost, children became adults, and adults accepted the mantle of responsibility and leadership, fully knowing the costs of failure. For some nations, it was a rapid transformation from dignity and prosperity to the most tragic kind of poverty, and for others, it moved disparate peoples toward a form of unity the likes of which had never been seen, and placed small, isolated countries at the center of world power.

In the end, the War left no one untouched. It was the greatest calamity Alden has ever seen, and because of it the world will never be the same.