The Apocalypse, the Church, and the City of God

While the arguable Point of Divergence for this setting is well into ancient history, the hard break is already past us in the real world: December 21st, 2012.

That is the day that the cataclysm known as "The Coming of the Azure Flames" began. It was the culmination of a secret war between three conspiracies whose conflict actually ensured the very event they all feared.

The three parties were the resurgent Fallen Angels, released from their prisons starting in the 19th century. They assumed control of an extant pro-Satanic network and set it to the task of bringing their former empire of Babylon back from the ruins of a past now considered mythology. Part of that included the resurrection of their children, the Nephilim. The Angels turned the network into a two-part entity, an outer group of self-interested globalists and an inner group of themselves and the cultists who serve them. Opposing them are a handful of faithful men trying to save Civilization.

All of them failed.

The reason is that the plot for 2012 was a global-scale mass human sacrifice, concealed as a coordiated terror attack upon the ten most populated cities in the world via nuclear weapons. The energy released by such a sacrifice was intended to fuel a ritual work of sorcery whose aim was to shatter the remaining bonds keeping the greatest demons and angels bound, thus making complete the needed elements for a Second Babylon. Most of them were in sacred sites doing the ritual work when the bombs went off.

The globalists thought that this was a covert operation to take out key rivals in the world by crippling them as well as creating pretexts for invasion and occupation. They wanted World War 3, and didn't care about the billions incinerated in an instant that had to happen to make that goal real. They hid in many bunkers and other secured locations when the bombs went off.

Their shared enemies, at this point, had been reduced to a handful of men scattered throughout the world- and only one of them was not convalescing. They had been shattered, and the one able-bodied man left quietly went to Jerusalem to pray for God to intervene.

He did.

The fires were not the judgement. The release of Legion was the judgement. When the Nephilim realized what happened, they panicked and fled to the secured bunkers- abandoning the cultists to their fate. The Angels followed suit, seeing what was undone and how; the few that could remain on Earth did so, while the rest fled the planet entirely and took along with them many subject peoples, settling as close as they dared to prepare for a counter-attack when the wave of annihilation subsided.

Civilization all but perished, as did Mankind. Many nations went extinct over the three days that the Flames burned the world, and then the slain--possessed by Legion--arose as the demon's collective body to consume those that remained. Yoked to the demon's will, the slain and the damned served the fiend if they did not want to cease to exist at all.

While the Angels and Nephilim arose as false saviors, a true one did exist quietly. The Church survived, but not by any obvious evidence on Earth; Rome had its undead problems just like everywhere else. No, the Church survived because the fruits of a research problem begun in the 1970s, and breaking through in the 1980s, went live in 2010 and within that project the nucleus of the Church emerged to begin the long work of reclaiming Man from despair and Creation from the Enemy. This was the City of God.

Taking its name from the philosophical work of the same name, it was a place without a space, where wonders first manifested and their teachings first mastered. Taking inspiration from past episodes and previous tales, they did not come forth as the believed City at first; they came forth as individual men, spreading hope and showing the enduring nations that they can smite the Enemy and build themselves back from the ruins they fell into- all they needed was to return to the faith of their fathers, and freedom could be theirs once more.

In time, after generations, Legion once more fell and returned to the living death he formerly suffered. The undead wave he spawned subsided. The Angels and Nephilim that survived then turned to warring with each other. These were the Wars of the Damned, which would fuel the return of the Church as the nations rose up once more, unifying Mankind while allowing each nation to remain separate and distinct- a House unto itself, but a House in a neighborhood of the nations of Man.

As the age turned, and the cleansing of the Enemy from Earth--and then from the solar system--spread the Church remains the fatherly institution to guide Man to wisdom time and again. The City of God remained the core all this time, ensuring that no entryism took root and no heresy found fertile soil, and to this day none by those allowed within its sacred sanctums knows the secrets that grant the City its power or the depths of the wisdom and knowledge preserved therein. For most, they know only that the City is responsible for the creation of Faster Than Light travel, Super Robots, and other wondrous technologies that make Galactic Christendom possible.

The Enemy has come to realize the importance of the City. It is now a race to see if the City can attain true security before the Enemy finds a way to seize it for himself, and some suspect that the Enemy is closer than they would like to believe in doing that.