https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MTTZ8jI8kw
Things to see and DEFINITELY not see in and around Zenith : the border with Coffesia
UrbEx with Cole! He really shouldn't be there. It's a restricted zone. The air, thick and tasting like iron, might still not be safe to breathe, the phenomenon of the red dust keeps expanding after all these years, and there are minefields here and there leftover from the war. There are fewer guard posts around Yenrotta than further away East and West, making it the preferred place of illegal crossing between the two countries, as both sides seem to agree that if the shrines commemorating the tragic history of the place, and the eloquent warning signs plastered across the fences don't discourage defectors and intrepid tourists alike, the aforementioned risks would do the trick in stopping them, as they usually do. It is not often you'll see these two nations agree on anything.

Even research programs have difficulties obtaining the requisite permits to legally enter the perimeter, which has led, all these years later, to only a limited understanding of what happened to the molecular structure of the city and why exactly its buildings melted the way they did. Samples were of course collected on many occasions, each time attempting to optimize timing and conditions, but, taken out of the area, appeared to decay at an extremely rapid rate, as if the stone, steel, glass, concrete and other material, including allegedly the flesh of the inhabitants, had been turned into something else which, taken out of this altered environment, would rapidly disintegrate. Said environment is itself decaying, but at a much slower pace predicated, the leading theory goes, on its mere size. To put it simply, it is believed that the two states of matter – the one we're accustomed to, and the one created through the blast of the powerful weapon, are alien to one another, and systematically pull apart and dismantle their counterpart whenever it is isolated. It is, after all, the very theory behind the destructive property of the weapon.

As a result, among other reasons, the wide expanse of rocky terrain South-West of Zenith, once a mix of farmland, industrial fields and desert, is nowadays mostly taken over by the latter, colored a reddish hue by a mix of residus propagated by the wind, and the curious, yet unexplained expansive property of the matter thus created. In some distant future, there will be nothing left of the ruins, and life as we know it might then regrow.

For thousands of years, these inhospitable steppes were a part of the fearsome nomadic wolves' territory, who, whenever they could unite, would represent a major threat to the Semantian empire; until more recent times, the different states who occupied this border region were all reflections of this dynamic. In the 16th century, exiled feline nobles from Psaria were offered this region by Semantia to create a new buffer state against wolven incursions. New Psaria was organized around three powerful cities : Pessarai-Dezara (literally : “camp/outpost of the Psarians”) nowadays known as Paradise, Bimblikand (Baembellik-Ikand, “the Southmost”), and Yenrotta (Higen-rheot, “the sacred heart”). There, the exiled Psarian merchant princes did what they did best : create mercantile opportunities out of not much, acting as facilitators between Semantians and Wolves. Many other factors were involved, but this new paradigm is often credited for bringing a peace never seen before to the region, by easing the ancestral tensions with the wolf tribes and slowly integrating them into a form of Semantian commonwealth.

At the turn of the 19th and 20th century, new challenges would emerge. Revolution and war would tear apart the entire world, but no other region would be as mercilessly carved up, butchered and martyred as New Psaria.

During the conflict, Paradise was fought over and won by Semantian and allied troops, while Bimblikand would remain as the capital city of the new Coffesian state in the south, as the battle lines stabilized over the years of war in between the two, where stood Yenrotta. Poor Yenrotta.

Paradise rose again as a major trade hub after the war, damages would be repaired, losses would be more than compensated. Bimblikand would be rebuilt in the new Electronic style, and is to this day the seat of Coffesian power. But Yenrotta was a different story. The battlefield city had not only been completely destroyed, the new technologies that were deployed by both parties during these desperate times had made the entire area utterly uninhabitable. Indeed the martyr city saw the first and, to this day, most extensive use of the E-bomb.

The situation was made worse by the fact being a frontline city actively disputed between the two factions, there was no way to safely evacuate its civilian population. The hundreds of thousands of inhabitants had to leave the city mostly by their own means, leading to untold confusion and chaos. Tragically, many chose to stay, fearing that troops from either side would either gun them down mistaking them for enemy columns, or send them back to the hellish cauldron they were escaping; and they would have to take the chance of walking through possible minefields anyway. By all accounts, these people all died in the cursed city, as no sign of life was detected shortly after the dust had settled. It is estimated that between these people, and victims of the vicious fighting, about a quarter of the total population, 150,000 people perished. Survivors, by the tens of thousands, fled in all directions, desperately seeking the protection of whatever commanders they could encounter putting their lives at risk to create corridors of evacuation, or anybody else who would escort them to any kind of safety. Ideological alignment made virtually no difference in the direction these people went. It is estimated that they ended up in about equal parts in Coffesia and Semantia, and to this day the Semantian part looks back at a tragic time in history that saw the world eat itself with as much gluttony as it was needless, the Coffesian remembers their enemies showing their true demonic selves.