1983, November
Cyrephus Dagzenar, in his four hundred and thirty-eighth year of his
life stood on the balcony on the topmost floor of his house outside Warrenton,
Oregon. Facing the Pacific, eyes shut deep in trance he could feel it. Within
days he would reach out and draw limitless power from the rising tides coming
from the Shadow.
The first human hands to touch the line between Earth and Shadow were
hands corrupted by chaos and long since spurned the touch of death itself.
Drawing power from the rising Shadow itself, those hands also put back into the
tides a dark chaos that spawned a spark of wind to push against the tide. The
wind formed a ripple, turning to a wave that would crash against all of Shadow,
and Shadow itself would push back and a storm would rise.
The storm of Shadow forced waves to touch the
Earth, alighting bits of magical energy long before it’s proper time. The
natural rising Shadow had years before started to quietly seep the minor stuff
of legend back into life, but the waves bring brief spikes of high magic into
the world, allowing things with no business on Earth to pass over.
It was the first wave that brought demon blood to earth, tainting the
blood of a human. It was the culmination of four hundred years of patience.
And magic walked the land.
December
21st, 2000
Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The lethal injection
execution of Jonathan Carson Gladstone occurred this morning at 8:15 AM.
Gladstone was convicted more than two years ago of the slaying and ravaging of
more than forty people outside Standing Rock in June of 1998. A near complete
lack of evidence in the slayings only the testimony of two survivors, both
Pueblo natives who were wounded during Gladstone’s rampage. Both men remained
stoic in the face of the man they claimed had ‘brought a river of blood to the
land.’
Sightings of packs of northern
grizzly bears, more than a dozen in number continue to be reported all across
the Navajo nation reserve, reaching throughout Utah and the northern parts of
New Mexico and Arizona.
March 18th,
2001
Professor
James Marsen of Boston's MIT gives a lecture to his class about the anatomy of
demons and their possible origins on earth. Included in his lecture is a corpse
of what is later identified to be a human cadaver, with it's skin removed and
the hide of a crocodile stretched over the body.
Three days later, Professor Marsen was removed from his teaching position.
May
12th, 2002
An unknown storm sprung up from a clear spring morning from the foothills
of the Rocky Mountains outside Jackson, Wyoming. On a clear radar screen the
destruction continued at a ponderous two mile an hour pace for nearly
forty-eight hours, covered by dozens of news affiliates. The narrow path of
destruction meandered southwest and nearly leveled the small town of Pinedale,
then on the second morning simply stopped, seeming to burrow briefly into the
ground before it dissipated entirely.
FBI
investigators estimated three thousand deaths and sixteen million dollars in
property damage, as well as untold destruction to the forests where the
forty-foot wide path rips through the Shoshone national forest for nearly it’s
full ninety miles.
Investigating agencies have been completely
unable to explain the storm, the national weather services satellites have been
showing a clear and cloudless sky over the area for more than a week.
