In Volume II, From the Ashes, the challenges continue to arise. As the family becomes a town, then a city eventually a region, hope spreads in all directions and the entire West begins to return to life. The tasks of rebuilding government, commerce and security are met with the reality of living in a more and more desperate and bleak world, and the little nation must defend itself against attacks from other groups as hunger, desperation disease and anarchy are slowly reducing the world to primative savagery. Can they survive and overcome?