“It was a catastrophe. By its nature it couldn’t have been predicted or prepared for. It could have, but no one did. No one reasonable, or realistic, at any rate. The catastrophe lived and grew in the sand that accumulated in the eyes of nightmaring paranoids, and was scratched aside with the dawn.
“What was felling was how that single disaster affected everything else. It was an incident apparently unencumbered by history, precedent or narrative, but its happening twisted the world around it, lacerating and poisoning and crippling everything else. No body could inoculate themselves from the catastrophe. That was how the world ended. With the unanticipated event that revealed how fragile everything else in the world had always been. Our mistake had been confusing the fact that civilisation was older than the eldest of us with our faith and desire that civilisation was therefore destined, immortal and inviolable.
“We’d forgotten that civilisation was only an answer, and that there are far more questions than answers.”
And this was the dream, or the sentiment, that awoke so many people that morning. It came to some as just a sense of crippling forboding at the sensation of an event they knew was coming but couldn’t envision. It came to others as the sudden understanding that their children were mortal. With more of them it came with the recognition of the rot accumulating in their bones and teeth. It was the inarticulate dread that led us to start fires, tens of thousands of winters ago.
from the Ledger Demain, excavated from the House 2028
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