Hot love
The heat is on across the world. As a result, we all experience heat waves and a thirst for rain. Summer love is in the air. Ah, but maybe, just maybe, we are looking forward to the Fall a little early. No?
Thought of as a cooler summer clime, Europe suffered its third summer heat wave, fueling ravaging wildfires and threatening millions of people. Across Iberia, Portugal and Spain recorded over 1,000 heat-related deaths. In France, hundreds of people fled wildfires. Heck, a runway melted in the UK! Wales, the ancestral home of the Bran Family across the worlds of the SalvoVerse, recorded its highest temperature EVER. China, Canada, and the US. Everyone suffered from the rising heat.
Is this new? Well, we are in an interglacial period that began at the end of the last glacial period, about 10,000 years ago. Namely, the dawn of the Sedes and the recovery from the Tor’Clonic Wars. Since the end of the last Ice Age, temperatures spiked. These temperatures rose to ranges higher than those we are currently experiencing. Indeed, one such period known as the Medieval Warm Period led to increased examples of ergot within grain crops like rye across Europe. What followed was a plague of werewolves.
Werewolves?
Ergot is the name given to a specific form of Claviceps purpurea, a parasitic European fungus, which grows on rye and related cereals like wheat and barley. Besides the burning, nausea, chills, and pain, ergot poisoning also causes mass hallucinations and irrational behavior. Gripped by mass hysteria brought on by the consumption of the fungus, it is likely those who saw werewolves believed it. Likewise, others believed themselves to be werewolves.
Don’t let tales of ergot poisoning fool you. True werewolves exist. Heroes such as John Davies. Creatures like the Thanes, Sepul harrier troops, elder vampires, and the Jagard roam the realms and histories of the Earth.
All this talk of werewolves aside, temperatures after the Younger Dryas spiked and largely remained higher than today. Besides episodes like the 8200 Year Event and the Little Ice Age that corresponded with the celestial devastation of Ragnarok, the global temperatures held above those of today. We face far warmer periods than the present, and people have constructed structures and modes of living not intended for the regions of historically tropical and even desert climates. Unique structures and different approaches to settlement are required to remain in the different regions of the planet. The Earth will do fine without us. What will the future bring?
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Creativity is doing!
