"GRAY" preview

The world was spent; and on the eve of a new century mankind exhausted their last resources in their futile attempts to own a crumbling Earth. The Fourth War encompassed the planet like an errant plague over all life. The air became thick with ash and the smell of death. The very sky could no longer hold any light, but was nothing but a constant, haunting shade of gray. No day, no night… Humanity, with all it’s great intellectual and scientific prowess had singlehandedly brought about virtual extinction to the core of life.
Out of the mists crawled the survivors; doctors and laborers and housewives. The toxic planet spared few and far between, but those unfortunate enough to breathe the noxious air made their way to secluded islands far from the deadly main lands. It was on one of these sparse islands that the first Salvation City was erected: New Mecca; a city held in a safe cocoon of falsified atmosphere, a city of second chances.
New Mecca rose on the sweat of all who could lift their feet; great scientists became great leaders, and the city grew from the hope they sowed in the ashes. It was a city of equals: equal squalor, equal pain, equal hunger…until the Others came.
It had long been assumed that anything remaining on the main land after the first decade or so was either dead or irradiated to the point of insanity. But the Others came…in boats and out of the sea itself, they came. The Others did not die on the main land. The Others didn’t breathe the toxic air, did not rely on the Earth to live…
The Others did not live at all.
The legends that were once so easily be masked by the bustling guise of life could no longer hide in the shadows of a moving world…they needed the blood of man if they were ever to survive; so they followed man. But something had happened to these once beautiful, proud demons; the power they took from the night was no longer available to them. With no night, they were as weak and frail as any human, save for their immortality and easy dietary needs; they barely maintained superior strength. The vampires were now subhuman, and quickly fell into servitude in the Salvation Cities. The walls were built high on their backs; caste systems started to form. The way of science was the way of nobility, and the pawn-players soon took to dangerous political status among the slowly growing population.