Ten years later, a meeting was called amongst the current great world leaders, it was to be held at Veridian, a capital city for the nation Elysium.
The representatives arrived at Elysium the way most people arrived at Elysium for the first time trying not to look impressed, and failing.
Their transports set down on a landing platform cut into the side of a mountain that had been hollowed out and rebuilt from the inside, glass and steel threaded through raw stone in a way that made the old rock look almost like it had grown the architecture itself rather than had it imposed. Below the platform, terraces of green spilled down toward structures that glowed faintly even in daylight. Above it, more of the same climbed higher still, disappearing into cloud. Each delegation's guards fanned out on arrival with the practiced discipline of people whose job was to look unimpressed no matter what they were standing inside of, and each delegation's leader managed, with varying degrees of success, to keep their own face just as still.
They were escorted from the platform through a series of corridors that felt less like a government building and more like the inside of something alive, and into a chamber at the structure's core round, quiet, dominated by a single circular table with six seats spaced evenly around it, and above the table, an advanced projection array humming faintly in standby, waiting to be asked for something.
Refreshments were offered first, because Elysium did very little without first performing the version of hospitality it thought the moment required. Six representatives took six seats, guards posted at a respectful distance along the chamber's curved walls, and for a few minutes the room held the particular, careful small talk of people who did not fully trust one another but had all, for their own reasons, agreed the meeting mattered enough to show up for.
Then Chairman Desmond Kade set down his glass, and the small talk ended.
"As you all know," he said, rising just enough to signal the meeting had properly begun, "the world went to shit because we humans couldn't agree with each other. We're still proving that particular talent, even after everything it's already cost us." A faint, humorless smile. "That's not why I called you here, though."
"We already know the world's a mess, tight pants," the Zastava representative cut in Marshal Yevgeni Rurikov, broad-shouldered, wrapped in a heavy grey coat despite the mild climate inside, his voice carrying the flat, clipped cadence of a man who'd spent a career being unimpressed by rooms nicer than the one he'd grown up in. "We've got ants the size of buses out there and demon children burning through half the map. Tell us something we don't know."
Kade didn't rise to it. "That's precisely what I'm about to do." He lifted a small remote from the table and pressed it once. "I don't mean the world is changing in the ways you're all already losing sleep over. I mean it's evolving. I'd go as far as to say — healing."
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The projection array above the table flickered to life, resolving into an image that filled the room's center: a stretch of land reduced entirely to grey, cratered wasteland, the unmistakable signature of an old-war strike zone, the kind of place every nation at that table had learned, from bitter experience, not to send anyone without protective gear and a very good reason.
"This was captured ten years ago," Kade said. "A site none of your nations have bothered revisiting since, because none of you had reason to believe there was anything left there worth the trip."
He pressed the remote again.
The image shifted. The same coordinates, the same ruined outline of whatever city or region had once stood there except the grey had given way to green, grass thick across ground that should have stayed poisoned for centuries, and near the center of the frame, alone and improbable, a single pine tree stood tall enough to cast a shadow.
"Something that was supposed to be impossible," Kade said, and for the first time since the meeting began, something genuine cracked through his usual detached calm not quite excitement, but close enough to it that everyone in the room noticed. "This isn't the only site. We've catalogued similar recovery across dozens of coordinates now, all of them dead a decade ago, all of them quietly coming back to life while the rest of us were busy watching our own borders instead."
Nobody spoke for a long moment. Every representative at that table had spent years learning to keep their face as still as the seat they sat in, and every one of them, for just a moment, failed at it completely though not, this time, for reasons any of them were especially ashamed of showing.
“How did we not notice this” Supreme Commander Elena Voss thought, already recalculating, in the cold, practical part of her mind that never fully switched off, exactly how much new territory a dozen recovered sites like this one might represent, and what it would take to be the first flag planted on any of them.
Land, High Warden Cassian Bellarmine thought, doing arithmetic of his own Arx Sancta's population had outgrown its walls twice already in a decade of steady faith-driven growth, and a world quietly opening back up meant somewhere to put the next generation of believers without breaking the walls a third time.
The Anning representative, Director Su Wen, said nothing at all at first, composed and unreadable as her whole closed nation tended to be but Voss caught the small, precise way her eyes tracked the coordinates scrolling beneath the image, filing away exactly where in the world this healing had been documented, and Voss understood, watching her, that isolation had never meant disinterest.
The Tumaini representative, Supe Zuri, leaned forward with open, unguarded delight, already saying something under her breath to her second about the fertile stretch shown in the image, already imagining, Voss suspected, how much further Tumaini's borders might stretch if the ground beyond them had actually started forgiving them.
Rurikov, for his part, had gone quiet for the first time since the meeting began his earlier sharpness folded away behind the calculating stillness of a man doing the one kind of math his nation had always understood best: how much new buffer land stood between Zastava's walls and everything they were still afraid of.
Kade let the silence hold a while longer, watching six very different kinds of hunger settle over six very careful faces, before he spoke again.
"That," he said, "is exactly why I've called you here. Not to mourn the old world. To discuss what we do with the new one — who moves first, who moves where, and how many of us walk out of this room still calling each other allies once the discussing is done."