The flag of Canumer
Excerpts from
A Short History of the War for the World by
Kennet bo Calgry:
The stories of how they first came here are manifold. One unlikely tale tells of a young man who summoned one from another dimension, hoping to use it against a love rival, only for more to follow the first, with the young man doomed to see his love slain before he too perished. Another implausible but popular fable is that of an evil conjuror who sacrificed his own daughter to gain their power but lost control of them. The most common stories tell of them coming from the sky in a hail of meteoric fire, or from the depths of the earth as volcanoes around the world erupted during what we now call Year Zero. These latter stories are lent credence by the only surviving records from before Year Zero, which report huge meteor showers as a comet passed close by our Earth and also document unprecedented seismic and volcanic activity as Year Zero arrived and humankind entered the Years of Fire and Death, as the War for the World began.
Regardless of where they came from, the dragons attacked without warning, seemingly determined to wipe out all vestiges of human civilisation, from our greatest cities to our most remote nomadic communities. Hundreds of millions died in the first months, the majority in Chin, Indus and what the old records call the Western World.
Initially they seemed invincible, with our destruction almost assured, but after many years small weaknesses were identified. Heroic sacrifices by warriors from around the world, working together in alliances which could never have been foreseen in the decades before, slowly fought them to a standstill. After over a century of fighting simply to survive, the first longed-for hopes of victory came when a combined Indi-Kyrg-Tajik force destroyed a dragon stronghold in the foothills of the Himalayas. This was not the end of the struggle, but it was the beginning of the end, though it did not seem like it at the time and many setbacks still lay ahead. It took another three hundred years and millions more deaths before the last dragon was killed in a suicidal assault by Canuck-Merican-Mexco warriors in the devastated lands of Yellstone.
By then, it is estimated that less than a hundred million humans were left alive, in scattered communities around the world. Vast swathes of the world were rendered uninhabitable, much of the old biosphere was extinct and the nation states of old were gone, along with almost all of the accumulated knowledge of humankind. In their places grew up new nations. Some of them chose new symbols, focussing on a hopeful future. Others looked back to the symbols of countries which had been destroyed four centuries previously, hoping to use the glories of the past to move their new nations forward.
One such nation is
Canumer, which grew up in the northern and western parts of the continent known to the ancients as
North-Merica. Its flag is a combination of the flags of the two countries from before the dragons, using the following features from the old flags:
• Red and white stripes, from both the Canuck and Merican flags, though authorities differ on how many there were on each;
• A red leaf from the Canuck flag (though the type is unknown and some authorities insist it was actually a red star);
• A collection of stars from the Merican flag. Some authorities show the stars in a circle, others in a square pattern; all are in agreement, based on pictures of ancient military uniforms, that the stars were placed at the top right corner.
In Canumer's flag, the red and white stripes have been kept; there are nine stripes, one for each of the regions of the nation. The stars have been arranged in a circle, placed in the centre of the flag; there are 34 five-pointed stars, one point for each of the 170 men and women who died in the battle with the last dragon. Inside the circle is the red leaf of the ancients, surmounting crossed spears to symbolise the struggle against the dragons. Under
those spears is a speared dragon's head to symbolise that the final victory over the dragons took place in Canumer.
Edit: deleted repeated word, minor change to an adverb, added missing word.