The crisp wind blew through the jagged mountains, bringing the first snow of November. The flakes drift through the Bivarians, and slowly approaches the rolling hills of Koyagia, dusting the landscape with a thin white blanket. Chimneys of the houses leaking grey smoke into the sky, but this is drowned out by the ever increasing snowfall.
Koyagia a small nation, resting along a jagged coastline up in the north. The people have a very rich history, going back centuries, perhaps millennia, but they always got along. All the way back in the day, a small group of people came to what is now Koyagia, they are now called the Ayags, originating from the west, but otherwise their origins are unknown, and unknown to them as well. The Koians, natives to the land, welcomed them, but it soon become both of the peoples land. They now coexist in harmony, or so we thought.
Koiya and Ayag ran for election in September, and the new leader, Andy Malva, was elected as the leader, meaning the Ayag leader, Roy Lindor, lost. This means a lot for the people, because it mean who comes up with the laws for the country. They have always had a history of abiding by each others needs, but many Ayags were concerned about Malva ruling the nation.
Lindor was especially angry, because he didn’t exactly trust Malva. Malva seemed like the kind of guy that would pass utterly stupid laws, like President Tenzin in 1922, who couldn’t pass things he wanted because everyone else in the government was majorly Ayag, but he still caused great hurt. Lindor felt that this would be worse, since the majority of the government was now Koiya, who would probably support Malva in whatever scheme he wanted.
The snow was falling heavier and heavier, Lindor rushing home angrily from hearing the results. He pushed past the many civilians of Koyagia to his crimson red C250 Mercedes-Benz. He plopped down in the drivers seat, turned it on, and began to drive up the winding roads to his home in the foothills. The snow had already began to pile up on the road, so it was becoming increasingly difficult to get home, but when he did, he slammed both the car door and the door to his home, still slightly pissed from the day, and he got in bed, staring at the ceiling until he fell asleep slowly.
He awoke to the sound of his television, the news blasting the results of the election on the bright screen. He groggily got out of bed and fixed himself some coffee. He sipped nearly silently at the scalding coffee, still steaming fresh from the coffee pot. The news droned on until something caught his attention. A few government employees had mysteriously gone missing from the capitol building, which was odd to Lindor since something like that has never happened.

Sure, one member of the government has disappeared before, but four? Never. Lindor peeked outside of the window, the snow still falling, more than likely a blizzard had occurred the previous night because the snow was piled around his house up to his knees. He got dressed in multiple layers, the final one a classy outfit to wear to public affairs. He stepped outside, to find that the snow didn’t fall up to his knees, the street cleaners had pushed all the snow from the road directly to his house.
He walked to where his car was, now just a little higher point in the mound of snow that the plow had piled around the house, spending about an hour clearing the snow from it, clearing the driveway, cranking it, and making his way to the city, the roads extremely slippery from ice coverage. A car zoomed up behind him, but before he could turn to see who would speed that fast, especially on an icy road, the impact jarred him to the point of almost hitting his steering wheel. His car swerved off the elevated road and began to tumble down into a ditch. After what seemed an eternity of cursing that car and fate, the car stopped, critical damage done to the car, but otherwise Lindor was alright, except for the minor scrapes and bruises.   
He sat for a moment, upside down, before unbuckling his seat belt and falling onto the roof. He sat upright, but suddenly stood as still as possible. He heard rustling coming from the woods, but what could it be? He decided to wait it out in his safe pile of metal. When the rustling subsided, he emerged from his vehicle, and immediately was struck with something that knocked him out cold.
Lindor awoke in the backseat of a large car, the interior a purple velvet, and smelled of sweet cherries. He looked around, there was only one other person in the car with him, who was wearing all black, only driving silently up and down hills.
“Uh, hello.” Lindor said, the man didn’t say anything, just continued to stare silently like he wasn’t even concentrating on the road. He decided to say something else. “Where are we going?” Lindor tried to move around, only to find that he had been restrained.
“It does not matter.” The man finally responded, his voice was deep and drawn out, almost like he didn’t even live in Koyagia. His words were very over enunciated, leading Lindor to believe that he was some sort of sophisticated man.
“Yes it does, where are we going?” Lindor asked again, his voice more stern and serious. He tried to get out of his restraints, but all of his efforts were futile. The man never responded, continuing the stare intense stare at the road. The drive took an incredibly long amount of time, Lindor’s ears rang and popped, meaning they were increasing their elevation. He concluded that they must be headed into the Bivarian Mountains, but why?

The car ride must have lasted for hours, but when the car finally stopped, Lindor sighed a sigh of relief, until he realized he was still restrained. The man walked around and opened the back door to carry Lindor out of the car. He noticed that there was a symbol on the shoulder of the man, it was oddly shaped, but it was in the shape of the borders of Koyagia. Below that, it read “The True People”. This confused Lindor, but his mind was torn from that when he was knocked at his knees, and the restraints were removed.
He turned to thank the man for untying him, but he was already in the car and zooming off, leaving Lindor behind in the mountains. He tried running after the car, but he wasn’t fast enough. He trudged along in the snow, some fresh snow starting to fall. He had to find somewhere to go, it was pitch black outside, so he couldn’t really see to find somewhere. He finally ran into a rocky wall, and realized he must have found a cave. He entered, took off his outer layer of clothes, and slept on them, dead to the world for 10 hours.

He awoke midday, finding that the cave he went in wasn’t a cave, it was just a recess in the wall of a mountain. He realized that he was terribly thirsty, and needed to find some fresh water somewhere. He looked around the barren snow covered landscape, and there was no water in view. Then, he noticed that snow is just frozen water. He feels stupid because he did not realize that earlier. He shoved the snow into his mouth, an obvious mistake because it shocked him with the bitter cold.
He wandered around in the mountains, not wasting energy climbing them, because he was trying to live long enough to find food. He decided to begin moving west, because he’d much rather go to the Ayags homeland, but was he sure that it even existed anymore? He was walking, until he saw smoke rising from behind one of the peaks. He stopped dead in his tracks, got on his hands and knees, and moved very slowly toward the peak.
He turned the corner slightly to see what was producing the smoke, but all he saw was an obvious man made wall. He got off of his hands and knees and walked around the wall, it curving around something large, but there was a large amount of smoke rising, almost like a city. But no, there couldn’t possibly be a city there. He continued walking until he found a gate on the opposite side in which he came. He approached it, but he quickly zoomed back and hid behind a wall because he saw two guards pacing back and forth in front of the gate.
He mustered up enough courage, but more hunger than courage, and began to walk confidently up to the gate. The guards turned their heads, and looked straight at him. They stopped in their tracks and gawked at Lindor. They both turned directly at him, looking him directly in the eyes. Then, to Lindor’s surprise, they bowed at him.
“Mr. Lindor” The first guard began. He was a big, portly man with a deep voice and covered in a bright red uniform. “We would never think that you would be captured, sir. Please, come in, we will provide housing services for you, but first, you must head to the capitol building.” Lindor just nodded along, glad he would finally be safe, but wondering what this whole city is. It appears as almost the same size as Koyagia, with tall buildings with small little houses sprinkled all over the landscape.
The guards led him to a big building with marble pillars, almost like an ancient courthouse, be he recognized this because it looked almost identical to the capitol building in Koyagia. They led him into the building, across the slippery glossed mahogany wooden floors and into a small room with an oval table and a few chairs. At the end of the table sat a visibly old man, he appeared to be almost 80. His face withered with age and his eyes droopy like he hadn’t had sleep in the past year. The second he saw Lindor he straightened his posture, hands on the table, and began speaking.
“Hello, Mr. Lindor. I see that the Koian servant dumped you about a half mile from here.” He started, his voice extremely clear and almost over enunciated, something you would not expect from a man of that age.  Lindor thought for a nanosecond before speaking.
“Hello, and that was a Koian?” He said, a bit shocked and confused why the man was calling the man from the car a Koian.
“Oh, my bad. My name is Mr. McKnight, I am the current president of New Koyagia. And back to your question. Yes, he was a Koian, have you not known about their plot?” The intensely confused Lindor shook his head. “Well, this may take a while.” He cleared his throat, sipped at the bottle of water in front of him, and began to speak.  “Well, since we have a limited amount of time here, I’m going to make this short and sweet for you. The Koians have been expelling Ayags out of Koyagia ever since 1509, and they have been doing mass terminations every time that they have majorities in the government ever since 1775. This is why you’ve probably heard the famous story of “The Great Disappearance of 1882”, but you weren’t told that all 441 people were Ayags, now were you? What the Koians do is they take the people that they’ve captured, put them under anesthesia, keep them in a cell until they can transport them, and drive them up here into the Bavarians to leave them behind to die.”
“Then how did you, everyone else, me, and this city get here still alive?” Lindor interrupted, still intensely confused, but so far it made some sort of sense. “And why did they want rid of us so badly as to just drive us into the mountains and deliberately get rid of everyone?”
“Well.” McKnight began. “They’ve secretly wanted rid of us ever since their head minister in the 1400’s declared to them that being an Ayag was heresy, simply because they did not know where they came from, so they pretended to take this with a grain of salt, when to the contrary, they began missions to get rid of us soon after. They call themselves “The True People of Koyagia” even though the city was actually founded by both peoples. When they dumped the “Great Disappearance of 1882” here, the 441 people gathered together at a point and created this city out of trees they gathered over the period of a few weeks searching for food and livestock.  Eventually in 1898 New Koyagia was founded.”
“Uh.. okay…” Lindor said, still confused to the point of no return. “So the Koians want us gone, why hasn’t there already been a revolt yet?”

“That brings us to this.” McKnight grabs a remote and points it at the television in the corner of the room to turn it on. The screen flickered a few times before coming on, Lindor immediately recognising an Ayag sector of Koian aflame, and then it cut to a still picture of a Koian sector also aflames, people still as a statue in the picture yet Lindor could imagine them running for their life. The screen turned off, and Lindor jolted his head back to McKnight. “And that’s the revolt. It happened because people finally caught on to the Koian coup because of our spies in the area, but the flame sparked because of your disappearance.” Lindor just stared, utterly speechless to the thing he just witnessed on a screen of pixels.
“A...are going to do anything?” Lindor asked, stuttering beyond belief.
“No.” McKnight answered simply, his eyes almost half closed, making him look slightly annoyed.
“What?!” Lindor put his hands on the table and stood straight up. “Why not?!”
“Sit down and calm down.” Lindor sat. “We are not interfering because we can’t. We are too far, to unprepared, and too late. That video was from a few hours ago, the revolt is almost silenced.” McKnight's eyes drooped further, putting his head into his palms and shaking it.
“Oh..but will you ever do anything?”
“We hope to soon, we are getting prepared. We will hopefully mobilize sometime this week. But this blizzard will only make it worse off for us trying to get there. We do have a secret weapon, but we will refrain using it. But..” He smiled. “We will use it to scare them...today. They know of our existence, but they do not know about the nuke.”
“Oh, sounds good to me.” Lindor said, now no longer confused, just angry enough with the Koians. “How many of those nukes do we have?”
“Three, our location is not really an uranium hub. You really should go get some rest, here, it’s a small GPS to lead you to your designated home.” McKnight hands a small device to Lindor, on the tiny screen is a few words, right now it reads “Make a U-turn and walk 50 yards. It obviously doesn’t know about the existence of walls.
Lindor approached the house that the GPS lead him to. It was a medium sized cabin, perfect for this snowy weather. Smoke pouring out of the chimney, Lindor wondering how the whole house didn’t just combust all at once. He walked inside, the floors the same wood as the floor of the courthouse, glossed mahogany. To his delightful surprise, the table in the living room was already set for his arrival, almost covered with numerous choices of food, like one big Thanksgiving dinner just for him. He ate it quickly, starving from his little over one day of no food, and quickly retired to bed for the night.

Lindor awoke to the sound of a marching band outside of his house. He jolted upright and peered out the window to see just that. Countless men and women dressed in red, marching down the Main Street with big drums, tubas, and horns. Their footsteps were barely audible under the loud roar of the instruments that brought music to the people. Lindor got out of bed, still wearing the suit from the day he crashed since it was surprisingly intact.
He walked out his back door to avoid the marching group of people and navigated his way to the capitol building. He walked all the way back to the room where he first was brought to find it not leading to a room with a table but a large room with a huge screen,  McKnight standing in front of it.
On the screen was a large map of Koyagia, with the weather displayed on a large screen. He must have sensed Lindor’s arrival because he began talking. “We’d better start today, Lindor, the blizzard is coming.” He pushed a button on a large keyboard below the screen and an animation of the weather map began to play. A blue and white blob with dark purple in the middle moved across the map, first hitting Koyagia, then hitting New Koyagia. “The purple means blizzard like conditions, and that’s the biggest part of the storm too.”
“Yeah, so wait, we’re attacking today?”
“Mhm..” McKnight said. “Did you not see the marching band?”
“I did...I didn’t know what it was for though.”
“I see. Well, we will start with the nuke enough distance to where they can see it from Koyagia, but not too close as to destroy the city entirely. The plan is to detonate and then send in troops from the West and bomb the capitol building from above.” McKnight pushed a button that changed the screen into a simulation of the plan. “We will send a small amount of soldier from the north and from the south to corner the city, but we do not have access to the ocean, so if they can get off that rocky cliff they could escape us.”
“Mhm. But I have an idea.” Lindor started. “Perhaps we send in aircraft over the ocean and just make sure they can’t get there.”
McKnight shook his head, putting his face in his palms while doing it.. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.” He paused for a moment. “Oh, by the way, we’ve assassinated Malva. They’re trying to elect an emergency president at the moment. We’re about to detonate the first nuke, we should go.” They both could hear helicopters outside as they walked to the entrance. The marching band was gone, replaced now with a swirling storm of dust scattering from the blades of the helicopter. They both climbed in and McKnight handed a pair of goggles to Lindor, them both putting them on quickly before they took off.
McKnight produced a suitcase from under the seat, and Lindor gave him a questioning look. McKnight yelled over the helicopter as he opened the lid to reveal a large white button. “Nuke?” Lindor responded, but his voice too quiet for the helicopter, but he was sure that McKnight go the point.
“Nuke.” He said, the index finger of McKnight approaching the white button for what seemed like forever before he heard a loud click, and ahead a large mushroom cloud as they approached Koyagia. Lindor looked out the side of the aircraft to see thousands of ground troops and tanks marching toward Koyagia. Lindor looked back behind them through the back window of the helicopter. “Nuke!”
McKnight turned around just in time to see the bright red rocket in the sky fall behind the peak of a mountain, the very peak that bordered New Koyagia, and the mushroom cloud rise above the mountain. “No. No…No!” McKnight opened the suitcase and began to hit the white button repeatedly, three, four, five, and more mushroom clouds exploding in a circle around Koyagia, the tenth one landing directly in the middle.
There was one thing McKnight didn’t consider though. The air blast knocked the helicopter off its course into a large snow covered hill, the aircraft being bent, cracked, and shattered as it found its resting point against a tree. Lindor opened his then closed eyes to see a bleeding McKnight, a deep vermillion red like his Mercedes, impaled by a sharp limb from some tree. Lindor screamed and blasted out of the helicopter before blacking out.

He awoke to smell of smoldering wood, looking behind him to see that the forest they had landed near was now burnt to the ground. He was almost covered in snow, the snow falling from the sky harder and harder. He decided to walk toward Koyagia, but he couldn’t see far enough, but he knew when he got there, that Koyagia, or New Koyagia for that matter, would be no more. And he eerily knew that he was the only man left in the entire continent.
He explored the ruins of the city, almost unrecognizable. He needed a way to get back to New Koyagia without walking, but what? Exploring he came across the wreckage of his old car, now black and burnt by the fires caused by the nukes McKnight so eagerly detonated. Lindor continued walking, trying to get to his house, because his other car might still be there, he hoped.
After a few hours of walking, he came up on the ruins that was his old home. The same as everything else, now a black pile of ash. He saw his black hunk of a vehicle, burnt to the interior. He scavenged the ruins of his house to find the keys, and finally came across it underneath a collapsed support beam from his roof. He got into the vehicle, shifting uncomfortably in the burnt leather, and tried cranking it.
It was a miracle, it still worked. He drove it out and down the road back into the city, or what was a city, and began making his way back to the Bavarian mountains, the ash covered land turning into snow covered again to his delight. Nothing made him sadder and madder than seeing the ash, but the snow made him a lot calmer.
He turned off the road onto the thin trail that lead to New Koyagia, and to the gate, which was still standing along with the smoldering brick wall. He got out of his car and walked in. How many nuked went off here? Not many, since it was devoid of life, but structures still intact. He made his way to the courthouse, which was exactly like everything else, and entered. He made his way to the doorway in which he first met McKnight.
Upon entering the room, most of it seemed intact, the building must have been made from something thick enough to withstand a nuclear blast. He tried yelling for someone, but alas no response. He made his way to the big screen that was now black. A new button now stood out on the dull black keyboard. It was a big red button that read “Mission Failed: Press Here”. Lindor pushed the button.
The screen jumped to life and speakers turned on all around him, nice surround sound. The screen flickered, and the pixels illuminated the words “Mission Failed” on the screen in red, bold font. It then flickered once more and showed the words “Contacting Nation X, one moment.” Lindor let out a gasp and watched intently, what he heard next frightened him to the point of falling down.
“Mission failed, New Koyagia. Who am I speaking with?” The voice was very clear and more articulate than any other voice Lindor had ever heard, but he tried his hardest to respond professionally.
“This is Roy Lindor, Ayag presidential candidate of Koyagia, and now only citizen of both New and Old Koyagia. Who is this?”
“This is the president of Nation X, but you can call us Ayagia now that you’re the last one..” He started. “Home of the Ayags, 600 miles west of you. We are sending helicopters right now to rescue you, we must hear your story of the great and heroic battle you fought. The helicopters will be there in a day or two. Now, let me tell you about how you people got there. You fled Ayagia” Static interrupted the man in Ayagia and soon the screen read “Lost Connection”. It then read “Attempting Connection” and the man kept talking.
“In 253 AD” Static cut him off again, then it came back with only one word. “Okay?” Static cut him off once more, the screen reading “Lost Connection” shortly before the entire screen shutting down, leaving him in pitch darkness inside the capitol building. Lindor will never find out what happened that got Ayags in Koyagia in the first place and why they didn’t just stay in Ayagia.

The helicopters from Ayagia arrived about three days after the failed call. They were late because maps had not been made for the course from Ayagia to Koyagia yet, because it was secretly known as Nation X. The men from the helicopter conducted a search for Lindor, looking all over the ruins of the city.
Thy finally found him in the big screen room, laid down on the floor, the tiles painted vermillion blood from the gunshot wound in his skull. Any forensic evidence did not turn up anything besides the kind of gun and the kind of bullet. To this day nobody knows what happened, because there wasn’t a gun nearby and nobody was around for hundreds of miles when they searched the area for survivors..