Dear Student,

What follows is an adaption of diary of Emmett Carter before his Ascension.

While the decades during and after the Aurora Apocalypse are lost to us, the Ascended himself has allowed us to publish this work so long as we advise the reader that it may not be entirely accurate and will not present an unbiased viewpoint of the events.

One should also note that the Aurora was in flux during that period of time and some things that were possible in the early days are no longer possible, especially with the advent of the Akashic record.

Editors have included footnotes when possible to explain pre-history technologies or concepts.

The contents of this work may upset readers.

If you’ve ever been in a natural disaster, had a house fire, been assaulted, witnessed a murder, lost a loved one to violence, or have a strong opinion on the sanctity of life, please do not read this.

This diary contains dramatic scenes of a world in the throes of an apocalyptic event. There are no rainbows and unicorns; there is only loss, betrayal, uncertainty, paranoia, and death while the survivors struggle to rebuild their lives. That said, there are happy slice-of-life events included, because that is what makes the struggle worthwhile.

“She’s such a mega-bitch,” Astrid complained in my ear, the phone[1] carrying her petulant resignation with crystal clarity. “I wish she were dead.”

I blew out a heavy sigh and broke into a coughing fit. I had caught the virus two weeks ago and while the symptoms were minor for the most part, the nagging cough and shortness of breath were a bother. And a bit worrisome. I’m fifty-six years old and in that age range where the men drop dead from everything. Heart attack, stroke, high blood pressure, renal failure, diabetes, cancer, sexual exhaustion… But the doc told me that if I can make it past 60, my chances of living to 80 are pretty much guaranteed.

“You okay Daddy?” she asked.

“I’m fine Pumpkin,” I said, wiping my runny nose with a tissue. “The worst part was a week ago. I’m much better now.”

A familiar voice spoke in the background. “Tell Emmett that if he’s not here to pick you up Sunday, he better be dead. Some of us have real jobs and need to work for a living.”

That was the voice of the mega-bitch… I mean, the ex-wife. Thankfully, we had divorced before my grandparents died and left me with a modest inheritance. She’s still bitter that she can’t touch the farm or the small trust fund they left me.

“I’ll be there.”

“Just slow down as you drive by and I’ll jump in the back of the truck,” Astrid whispered.

“Sounds like a plan. I’ll see you Sunday afternoon. We’ll grab a fancy coffee on the way home.”

“Yummy!” she cheered, her voice changing from glum to glee. “And reboot the router in my observatory, the internet[2] is wonky again. I want to keep an eye on Methuselah’s star, they expect it to go boom literally any day now.”

“You know that if it went boom, it was over two centuries ago, right?” I said, trying to get a rise out of her. Methuselah’s star was her current obsession, and her world revolved around it. It was a puzzle for astrophysicists because it was apparently older than the known universe. Probably just a rounding error, in my opinion.

“Yes, daddy,” She sighed. “I’m quite aware of how fast light travels.”

I had built her a little observatory behind the farmhouse a couple of years ago when it became apparent that her fascination with the night skies wasn’t just a passing fad. Observatory sounds much fancier than “tin shed with an expensive telescope” doesn’t it? But it keeps her busy out here in the deep woods and doubles as a she-shed for her hobbies.

“So how about I just flip the breaker from inside the house?” I teased.

“Nooooo! I’ll have to recalibrate everything! It’ll take hours!”

“Maybe you should have spent your allowance on a battery backup?”

“But then I wouldn’t have the Skywatch software.”

The phone started wailing like a banshee.

I pulled it away from my ear and stared at it in confusion. It was buzzing, screeching, flashing, and suddenly became so hot it was burning my hand. I dropped it into the tissue-filled trashcan next to my recliner just as the television on the wall exploded in a cloud of grey smoke. Lightbulbs around the room flared to life like miniature suns and began popping like fireworks.

The trashcan burst into flames with a loud bamf! as the phone turned into a volcano.

Jumping up from my chair I rushed to the front door and grabbed the fire extinguisher, fumbled with the pin for a moment, and doused the flames with white powder. Smoke alarms were howling all over the house, their normal screeching tone altered into a warbling, unearthly wail. A loud pop from the kitchen had me scrambling to extinguish another fire as the toaster and electric kettle melted. Dropping the empty canister, I grabbed the kitchen fire extinguisher from next to the back door and headed to the laundry room to kill the power.

I yanked open the door to the laundry room to discover the main breaker panel on the back wall was smoking. I could hear arcing and popping noises from behind the metal cover and decided that opening it with my bare hands probably wasn’t a good idea. Time for a redneck solution.

The electronic lock on my gun cabinet refused to work, but it opened easily with the key in the ‘special’ drawer of my bedside table. I grabbed out the 12 gauge and loaded it with buckshot, then rushed outside to kill the power at the source.

The night sky was lit up with snakes of electric blues and pinks. I’d seen the aurora borealis a few times in my travels, the latest was several years ago when I spent a month in Norway. What I was witnessing now put that experience to shame. The aurora sounded like Rice Crispies, snapping, crackling, and popping as multicoloured ribbons squirmed across the sky. I stared at it, slack jawed as one of the locals until the transformer at the end of the driveway exploded in a fountain of orange sparks.

The power line to the house was glowing a dull orange, jerking like a snake as current flowed through it. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that wasn’t a good sign, that this was like the Carrington event back in the 1800s when a solar flare caused the telegraph wires to short out and catch fire. Shotgun in hand, I went to the backside of the house and shot the line where it connected to the house. Three shots later, 20 yards of red hot cable lay twitching in the yard.

After that it was just a matter of putting out the fires in the house, then rushing to the barn and calming the horses before they kicked the walls down. Everything remotely electrical was fried and every single battery in the house had popped like a firework. The batteries in my truck and the tractor had gone off like bombs, filling the air with the stench of hot acid.

Some time later I sat in a chair on the porch with a glass of whiskey, watching the sky. It was bright outside, the flickering aurora casting strange shadows across the landscape and painting the gathering clouds in rainbow pastels. Just over the tree line in the southeast was a baleful red eye the size of my thumbnail and bright as the full moon — the remnants of Methuselah’s star. Thunder grumbled in the distance behind me, the deep bass rumble promising rain soon to come. I reached in my shirt pocket check the weather app on my phone and gave a grim chuckle as the irony of the action sank in. This was a world-changing event. The bright orange glow in the south wasn’t city lights, it was fire. Everything was on fire. And since the motor in my truck was a smoking mess, I can assume that the local fire department isn’t going to be arriving any time soon.

My thoughts wandered back to Astrid, nearly a hundred miles away from home. My monkey-brain wanted to panic and start running there right now, but I kicked the little bastard back up in his tree. It would be foolish to set off right now, suicidal. I needed to prepare before I left the farm. Astrid would be okay for awhile, she was a smart girl and could take care of herself. If three years of judo and the ability to hunt and dress game couldn’t protect her, nothing would. My sons should be just fine too. They were raised in mostly the same fashion, taught to hunt, fish, and live by the Big Book of Manly Things. It’s a real book, check it out. Teaches you how to start a fire, dress game, build a shelter, carpentry, masonry, and other things that a man should know. And before you start thinking I’m some sort of asshole misogynist, Astrid was raised by the same book and her brothers are intimately familiar with domestic duties. Every Carter man can cook, clean, do laundry, change diapers, and run a household.

Not that I knew any of those things before I bought the book. I’m more of the sexy librarian type, to be honest. And if we’re being completely honest, I’m also something of a narcissist according to my therapist. But when my oldest boy Nick came along, everything changed for me. I was officially a parent. And I flung myself into being a good parent, despite the poor relationship I had with mine. Thomas came along a few years later, quickly followed by Doug. Then their mother left. Because despite trying to be a good parent, I was a shitty husband. I remarried on the rebound, and Astrid came along. And while I was still a shitty husband, Anne was a shitty mother. And that’s how I ended up with custody of Astrid.

The boys grew up and decided become blue collar workers instead of going in debt to my alma mater. They moved away to Baton Rouge, living as roommates and sharing a rent house while chasing the American dream. Nick went into welding, Thomas was an electrician, and Doug became a plumber. Solid choices for the future. Astrid wanted the stars and planned to attend university to study astrophysics.

None of them wanted to be an mechatronic engineer like their father. Can’t blame them. I did spend a lot of time travelling overseas.

Lightning flashed and startled me from my gloomy musings. Moments later, deep thunder rattled the windows on the farmhouse. Setting down my whiskey I walked into the driveway to get a look at the storm approaching from the north. The sky was pitch black behind the house, lit up with technicolour lightning bolts that flashed continuously, lancing into the earth below.

I’d never seen rainbow coloured lightning before.

“Hello! Mister Carter, you okay?”

I turned around to see my neighbour ambling up the drive on his horse.

“Heya Robert,” I said, giving him a wave. “Don’t come too close. I’m still sick with that virus and don’t have my mask on.”

“Oh, that right?” he pulled up a couple yards away. “We put dad in the hospital last week. He’s on a ventilator now but they expect him to recover.”

I winced. The hospital was probably burning to the ground as we spoke. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know. I’ve been holed up here for the last couple of weeks and haven’t been out. I’m glad to hear he’s doing okay.”

“We’ll have a birthday party for him when he gets out,” Robert paused, gathering his thoughts. “Well, we’re supposed to. The house damn near burnt down, so it might be awhile.”

“I had some trouble here too,” I said, jerking a thumb at the house behind me. “Everything electric decided to catch fire.”

“You think it has something to do with the lights?” Robert said, pointing up. “Ever seen anything like it before?”

“The aurora? Yeah, when I was in Norway,” I replied. “Not quite like this through. Nothing like this in the States.”

Robert chuckled. “I sometimes forget you’re not a foreigner with the way you speak.”

I have strange accent because I try to learn the local lingo when I travel. French, Spanish, German, it all mixes together a bit. Everyone here looks at me funny when I talk. I’m not a polyglot by any stretch, but if you don’t mind speaking to a mentally challenged toddler, I can hold a basic conversation in three languages. Four if you count English.

I opened my mouth to ask if he would keep an eye on my farm, and the world exploded around us.

A bolt of lightning struck Robert, crawling over him and his horse with multi-coloured tentacles before slamming into the ground like an artillery shell. I fell face first in the dirt, twitching and jerking, my muscles spasming like I’d been hit with a taser. I felt my heart flutter painfully, struggling, beating lopsided in my chest. A symphony of trumpets rang in my ears, blaring like it was the end of the world.

Then everything grew silent as I floated up from my body.

Calm. I was perfectly calm. It was like my emotions and thoughts had been shut off and for the first time in my life, my mind was absolutely clear. I simply… existed. No desires, no worries, no regrets. I am the love child of Marcus Aurelius and Buddha. I am an eternal Stoic at one with everything.

The world around me was glowing in a thousand shades of light. Every plant surrounded by a gentle aura. I could see small brightly glowing blobs, insects, scurrying through the grass. The farm house was nearly transparent and I had the feeling I could walk through the walls if I wanted. I spun around slowly, taking in this new experience. Robert and the horse lay on the ground, surrounded by millions of glowing motes. I watched as they swirled and seemed to take form.

A ghostly shape struggled up from Robert’s twisted and burned corpse, then collapsed into fireflies winking and blinking, swirling around his corpse. I glided over, idly curious, and felt a strange twinge in the area of my navel. Looking down I discovered a thin silver thread that lead back to tiny glowing orb in the head of my corpse.

Turning back to the chaotic mess of lights, I reached out a hand and they gathered around it, drawn like iron to a magnet. The rest of the motes were drawn as well and swarmed over me, slowly changing their colours to match mine and merging with my spirit form. As they were absorbed I felt stronger somehow, more substantial, more alive. My thoughts became more lucid. I concentrated on pulling all of the motes out of the corpses and greedily consumed them. When I had finished, my ghostly body appeared nearly solid and my thoughts were in order.

Was I really dead?

I floated back to where my body lay in the dirt. It was surrounded by a pale, flickering brown aura, a tattered sickly looking thing. Taking the silver cord that connected us in my hands, I concentrated on pushing this new energy I’d collected into the body. After a small amount of resistance, it began to flow. I watched as the aura strengthened, turning from a sickly brown to a bright swirling gold. I channeled everything I had through that thread, growing thin and ragged as the energy left my spirit form and entered my physical body. The aura surrounding my body was bright as a floodlight in the surrounding darkness.

I’m really tired now.

My concentration faltered as my thoughts became less coherent. The silver cord jerked painfully and I fell, yanked into the glowing orb.

Footnotes

1. Phone (Mobile Phone). A device that is used for long distance communication. Mobile phones used a series of towers to carry their signals, similar to the Mage towers that broadcast mana and update the Akashic records.

3. Internet. A global system of communication where one used a computer to communicate, download software or access data globally. Similar to how a Mage or other similarly Classed individual will use a focus like a staff, wand, or ring, etc. to access the Akashic records and purchase or activate spells.

Editor’s Note: Methuselah’s star, now known as the Dragon’s Eye, was thought to be older than the known universe. There is a direct correlation between it, the aurora, and mana.

Map: Pre-Apocalypse Southeastern Louisiana

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Copyright © 2020, Conteur. All Rights Reserved.

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