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The City, the Deserts, and the Sect.
World-Building in the ACD Post-Apocalyptic MM Romance Fantasy Series.
The post-climate-disruption world did not collapse evenly. It sorted itself into three places, each with its logic for surviving what the old world had left behind. The City, the Deserts, and the Sect shaped every life lived in the first century after the climate collapse. The queer characters at the center of the ACD MM romance fantasy series carried those places inside them long after the places themselves were gone.
These three places are crucial for the Crystaler Series and the first book, Elements, in the Taj and Song Trilogy. More about what the Disruption was in the separate wiki entry and in the timeline.
The City | The Sect | The Deserts
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The City
[Fact: Antarctica, built near the ruins of McMurdo Station]
After the Disruption: the first city
7 ACD–18 ACD
When the migrations after the great floodings began, people followed what already existed at the Antarctic coast: the remnants of a scientific base, a partial sewage infrastructure, and proximity to the sea. What they carried with them filled the gaps: salvaged tools, food stores, clothing, and, in some cases, equipment taken from underground laboratories that the general population knew nothing about.
By 7 ACD, the settlement had grown large enough to need a name. It started lowercase and then didn’t. The City.
The land was above water. It was a survival place, but not only. Around a hundred million people eventually lived within its limits, with more in the towns that appeared wherever the ground could hold them. But this happened later; what was right after the Disruption was a mess.
Buildings were whatever was available: ruins repaired, new constructions rising next to structures held together by luck and necessity. The sewage system was restored early and maintained firmly; the memory of what happened without it was too recent to ignore. Common bathhouses replaced the private plumbing most people no longer had access to. At night, the City went dark. Candles lit interiors; the streets outside were black.
Cold came in off the water. In winter, snow settled on cracked concrete. In spring, dampness replaced it. The smell was constant: sea salt, fish from the drying racks, cooking smoke, and the chemical edge of whatever the laboratories nearby were processing. The sound was constant too. Voices in many accents, the wind coming in hard between buildings, and underneath it all, coughing. People still carried the Disruption in their lungs, as the air carried the sickness.
Food came from the coast and from the Sect’s trade ships: fish and seaweed, preserved in salt and smoke. The promenade near the research labs had small food stalls, repurposed trucks that hadn’t moved in years, used as counters. Life happened fast and loudly. Clubs opened. Alcohol, drugs, art: all of it present, all of it urgent. Thirty-five was a usual lifespan, and the City lived loudly.
When Crystals were announced in 15 ACD and the first successful insertion performed in 16 ACD, the direction changed. Greenhouses followed. Vehicles began to move on energy rather than salvaged fuel. The nights were still dark in the winter of 16 ACD, but the shape of what was coming was already visible.
The Crystals era and the City at its peak
18 ACD–106 ACD
Crystals changed the City the way water changes stone—not all at once, but completely. Artificial energy powered the buildings, the transport, the research centers, the clinics, and the politics.
The City became the dominant structure in the post-collapse world: dense, ambitious, and poorly organized in equal measure. Its political arrangement was described by some as energy feudalism: power concentrated in whoever controlled the best Crystal supply (the Clar family), with the first formal mayor not appointed until 67 ACD. Before that, influence ran through corporations and cartels, and everyone who mattered knew it.
The cartels operated under legal covers (foundations, clinics) and grew without serious opposition. They moved through the Deserts and the City alike, looking for energy talent, experimenting with Crystals in ways that official science refused to document. The black market for artificial energy ran parallel to the legal one, and the line between them was not always clear.
Underneath the political noise, the City kept building. The net, a communication system resembling the old internet, was established by 22 ACD and freely available across the City and Deserts by that same year. TU University grew into a serious research institution. Scientists from the City and the Sect found ways to cooperate even through decades of mutual wariness. Crystal miniaturization succeeded in 78 ACD: implants small enough to wear invisibly, accessible to almost anyone. Life expectancy crept upward toward a hundred years.
The City at its peak was loud and contradictory. Activists protested Crystal monopolies. Energy weapons floated through unofficial channels. The labs pushed into territory that occasionally required a military response from the Sect and left the details classified. People lived longer, built more, and fought over what they were building with increasing sophistication.
Becoming the Union
106 ACD–113 ACD
The Sect dissolved in 96 ACD, and the City absorbed what that meant gradually.
The spaceship program, already years in development, became the dominant project of the late ACD period. Artificial energy engines tested with Sect-designed navigation devices (the e.i.), prototypes built at TU University with funding from the City’s political structure. Terraforming experiments on Earth continued through failures and eventual success.
By 113 ACD, the City became something else. The Urbes Union. A political structure rather than a place. The seven spaceships launched that year carried with them the last version of what the City had been: a survival settlement that had outgrown itself entirely and was now reaching for other planets.
The promenade, the fish stalls, the dark winter nights… Those belonged to an earlier version of the story.
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The Sect
[Fact: terraformed Greenland; rebuilt from a flooded island into a fully functioning agricultural territory]
After the Disruption: the founding
11 ACD–17 ACD
The island had been flooded. Then, in 11 ACD, three escapees from the underground labs arrived there on their sailboat, enhanced by their natural energy, and settled there together with other talented people.
The terraforming happened once and held. What had been underwater became usable land—farming territory, forests, and a protected internal settlement with adjusted seasons and clean air. The toxins that persisted everywhere else in the post-climate-disruption world were absent inside the Sect’s walls. The light was softer than it had any scientific reason to be (the reason, in fact, was very personal). Newcomers called it magic, but it was thanks to the first energy users’ great powers, later never surpassed. Called Ability, it was the natural internal energy that had allowed some to survive the Disruption more intact than others.
The Sect formalized in 13 ACD around a community of people with Ability. From the start, the organization’s logic was oriented toward the long term: libraries were built and filled with everything that could be collected, including art. Cultivation grounds were established. Animals were preserved. The orchard inside the walls was larger than food production required.
Buildings went up as collective work, members contributing energy to their construction. Shared investment that created shared ownership in a way that was both ideological and practical. The architectural style combined Japanese and Chinese elements with something Danish, built around heavy greenery, water features, training grounds, and a performance space. Sounds inside the compound were ordered: fabric moving, footsteps on wooden walkways, the controlled rhythm of cultivation practice, and bells marking gatherings.
The Sect’s clothes were specific: robes for cultivators and straw shoes. Tokens of energy-enhanced jade marked members. The language the founder imposed as the Sect’s official tongue was a simplified form of Chinese, framed as a cultivator’s elegance and practically a tool for creating separation from the outside world.
The Sect’s economic power rested on food. Terraformed Greenland produced wheat, vegetables, fruit, and livestock—abundance in a world where the Deserts were hungry and the City was dependent on fish and barter. Ships left the Sect’s bay twice a week: Tuesday and Thursday. That schedule organized inter-settlement politics more effectively than any formal agreement. Whoever controlled access to food controlled the conversation.
The Sect smelled of apple blossom and clean linen, incense from the cultivation spaces, and fresh bread from the communal ovens. It was, by the account of anyone who had visited both, unlike anywhere else in the post-climate-disruption world.
The Sect at its peak: science and conflict
18 ACD–85 ACD
After the personal crisis of the Sect’s founder, in 18 ACD, the Sect went into seclusion. The borders closed, a natural energy barrier was built, and nothing passed freely.
The Elders’ exam was formalized, a new internal calendar was introduced, and the board that had replaced the founder’s informal authority began making its own decisions.
Inside the walls, cultivation continued and improved. Without the constant interference of the outside world, the Sect’s average energy level rose (however, no newborns could reach the level of the Abilitiers from the underground). The libraries expanded. The internal sciences developed in directions that no one outside could track.
The seclusion held for decades, but it had its own internal pressures. Disagreements within the board shook the institution repeatedly. An inventor of significant Ability left in 20 ACD, and her work was lost with her. The founding Elder stepped down from any political involvement, citing personal reasons again, and the energy he had shared with the community stopped flowing. The board understood only then what it had been relying on.
The Sect reopened its borders in 51 ACD under a new Leader. Workers were admitted regardless of Ability level. The Academy was established in 57 ACD. Scientists from the City and the Sect began collaborating, first cautiously, then substantively. Crystal extraction and Ability restoration were successfully performed for the first time in 52 ACD, revealing details about how the two energies interacted in the body. The first prototype Gates for the Deserts’ camps were tested in 64 ACD.
During this period, the Sect was the most productive research environment in the post-collapse world. Natural terraforming projects reclaimed barren land in small but meaningful increments. Energy science advanced in ways that were partly shared and partly classified. One internal invention—a natural Crystal device called the e.i. with properties that could not be fully replicated afterward—circulated more as a story than as a confirmed technology, because the documentation was lost before it could be published. It was said that the Sect’s founder, who was reported dead in 54 ACD, knew about this device years before but hid the knowledge. His death was a mystery because his energy traces could be found in many places, yet nothing more could be detected.
The end of the Sect
85 ACD–96 ACD
The miniaturized Crystals that the City announced in 78 ACD solved one problem and created another. Small enough to attach to the body without visible marks and affordable and accessible to almost anyone, the new implants spread quickly.
Artificial energy became present in implants, in the City’s Gates network, and in power systems everywhere. And natural energy, which had always been sensitive to interference, began colliding with it.
For the Sect’s cultivators, the effect was physical and worsening. The barriers that had protected Ability cultivation inside the walls became less effective as the artificial energy network expanded around them. Cultivation grew harder. People with strong natural energy were rarer with each generation, partly from the corrupting effect of Crystals in the broader population, partly from the Sect’s persistently low birth rate, and partly from the simple difficulty of maintaining cultivation under conditions that had not existed when the Sect’s methods were developed.
The Academy closed in 93 ACD. The Leader and the remaining Elders entered seclusion inside energy barriers that could block collisions—a final protective measure, not a recovery plan. The Sect was officially dissolved in 96 ACD.
What remained were the structures: the libraries, the terraformed land, and the myths. The Sect’s Gate technology passed to the City’s TU University, but the natural energy research was partly preserved, partly lost, and partly classified in ways that kept generating questions long after the institution was gone.
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The Deserts
[Fact: primarily the continental ruins of Africa and other regions in Europe where climate collapse and infrastructure destruction made survival difficult but possible]
After the Disruption: the first camps
1 ACD–18 ACD
The Deserts were not a desert in the way the word had once been used. They were the ruins of the world that existed before: old mines, collapsed factories, former cities, and military warehouses sealed since the early Disruption period. What they shared was the look of abandonment: dust, rust, and sand moving in wind that had nothing to stop it. Dry heat during the day, cold at night. The mines were damp and darker, and people died faster in them.
Camps formed wherever survival was possible: near coasts where small-scale fishing helped and near ruins where old goods could still be extracted. The scavenging economy was specific and serious: metal for repurposing and trade, plastic containers, glass jars, copper wire, solar panels if they still functioned, and fuel that older engines could process. Medicine was mostly expired by 16 ACD. And the books, because they were valuable, the Sect collected them.
The camps were organized simply. A few main tents for whoever held authority. Water pumps, because water existed underground, and that, at least, was not a crisis. Two tents for a kitchen assembled from salvaged parts. Sleeping arrangements were separated for basic hygiene, enforced not from ideology but from the memory of the epidemics that had swept through in 2 and 3 ACD. Clothes were scavenged, not made. Having two matching shoes was luck. People wore long hair and decorated themselves with whatever they found; the impulse toward beauty existed here too, in the middle of the dust.
Literacy was rare. There were no materials and often no conditions for teaching it.
Food was the recurring problem. Barter with the City using stones from old mines; specific salvaged goods helped but were never enough. What people ate followed its own post-collapse substitution logic: roasted grain where coffee had been, carob paste, fermented bean spreads, and grain-stuffed casings. The Sect’s ships came twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday, along a fixed coastal route. Camps on that route had access. Camps that weren’t on it did not.
The cartels
18 ACD~50 ACD
The camp networks grew, and not all in the same direction. Some organized around practical cooperation: shared defense, enforced hygiene, collective resource management, basic dignity as a survival strategy. Others followed the logic of accumulation — more camps, more people controlled, slavery first as a tool for keeping fighters loyal, then as a trade. People were sold for experimentation. The camp networks that operated this way expanded to five large settlements with many smaller satellites.
The sounds of the Deserts during this period: wind, constant; generators coughing when they worked; silence at night so complete that the wind was the only thing in it. The smell: dust in everything, rust, smoke from campfires and burned fuel, and sometimes, in the driest conditions, nothing at all. Air so dry that smell faded entirely.
The Deserts’ cartels grew without serious opposition and eventually stopped pretending to be anything other than what they were. From small operations focused on finding energy-gifted individuals to exploit, the cartels expanded into territory control. After 18 ACD, forcing artificial Crystals onto people with natural Ability was common practice; it was either to punish them for not joining the cartels freely or to train them with artificial energy. Children were taken; what happened to families after was uncertain and often bad.
The Sect’s Army raided cartels in 52 ACD and disrupted the worst of them, but the Deserts remained difficult to govern from the outside. Distance, isolation, and the absence of any unified political structure meant that control kept reorganizing itself under new arrangements.
The end of the Deserts
70 ACD–113 ACD
The Gates changed the Deserts more than anything else had. When the Sect established the first Gates for their camps in 72 ACD, the isolation that had defined life in the Deserts began to erode. The cartels that had grown powerful in isolation found the conditions that had sustained them changing underneath them.
As the City expanded its Gates network, powering it by artificial energy, unified across settlements, and tied to ID systems and communication tools, the Deserts stopped being a separate world and became a marginal region of a larger one. The camps that survived did so by integrating. Those that didn’t dissolve, their people dispersed into the broader population of what was becoming the Urbes Union.
By 113 ACD, the Deserts as a distinct place with its own economy, its own social logic, its own particular darkness and resourcefulness, had ended. What replaced it was terraformed new land.
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This wiki entry is part of the ACD series world-building. The ACD series is an MM romance fantasy set in a post-apocalyptic world shaped by climate collapse, two competing energies, and the queer characters who lived through all of it.
→ See also: The Disruption and the Underground Labs | The Union Era: Planets and Terraforming | The Elders | Energy Scale | GESDA: the Gates | Timeline]