Music: Trinity Blood OST - Trinity Blood.
It was doomed to fail. The old world was too greedy. Needed too much from an earth which could not give it to them. Mother Gaia only had one thing left to give to the world so hungry for more, more, ever more.
Magic.
It happened in the year 2276. An earthquake in Los Angeles signaled the arrival of mother Gaia's energy flowing through the earth. The Americans thought nothing of it. Earthquakes were common in Los Angeles, and the intensity hadn't been bad. A couple buildings turned to dust, but they were old and worn. Nobody paid it any attention. It was in the media a day or two, then the world forgot again.
Tokyo felt her energy next. A flood rampaged the land. They were prepared, and fended it off without large casualties. Nobody concerned themselves about the same thing happening in India with countless casualties. Japan was richer and got the attention the poorer country should've had. Maybe then they'd started noticing. But the humans were blind. They were inferior to the species they'd killed the last couple hundred years. Great hunters went extinct. Siberian tigers, white tigers, snow leopards... They all vanished as the ice melted. So did the polar bear and most of the penguin species.
When the first volcano in Iceland erupted, some finally noticed. Geologists speculated it was the global warming that caused this massive outburst of earthquakes, floods, and now volcano eruptions. From their point of view, it was a plausible explanation. Humans kept going on with their lives, almost forgetting the nature phenomena that became everyday to them now. Even when tsunamis hit Indonesia, they didn't seem to care. It'd happened before after all, right? It was just a coincidence that all these things escalated. Nothing big.
But they were wrong. Oh, so wrong.
As mother Gaia's energy rushed throughout her Earth, it got worse. Populated areas were all but destroyed. New York, Tokyo, Paris, London, Abu Dhabi - everything laid in ruins by powers of earthquakes, wind, water or volcanoes. In the next five hundred years, Earth's population of humans shrunk to 3 billion. Less than half of what had been. Humanity was set back to the middle ages as everything laid waste around them, and the continents began to move closer with every earthquake, every volcanic eruption, ones undersea connecting the floating continents into something more permanent. In the eons that followed, human population shrunk even more. In our time, there are only about two hundred thousands left. But they are spreading fast once more.
Ah, forgive me my small jump into the future. Let's return to the story.
And thus... The greedy humans' reign over the Earth came to an end, and mother Gaia once more had what belonged to her, to nurture and regrow.