What separates a deep winter from a real winter? The length of day?

Of course not. Look at the sky on a winter September, April, June, July. You'll be able to see it then, the pall of darkness, its strange expanse. Suddenly the sun is painted on the sky (although not to the same extent, not with the same style or impressionism as Starfall 2046, the third and final rank 13 event, if the world of ESP is foreign or unnatural to you then keep this difference in mind) and follows a strange, unreal pattern.

"Unreal is imprecise," Tamara said the year we met, 2062, which had also been the only year without one in the past seven years. "It's not like you'd get anything other than real numbers on meteorological equipment."

"Aren't all numbers real."

"No. The square roots of minus 1 aren't real, I think."

"But they exist otherwise you wouldn't be talking about them," my little twelve year old self had replied, and honestly I had been completely correct. Still was.

"Yeah, but they're not called real, are they."

"That's stupid. They should change it then."

"Too late," Tammy replied, already sullen at thirteen. Wait, you say. "If you met online, how could you tell?" I'm a psychic, of course I can tell. I made myself familiar to her, and she was rendered familiar to me in my minds' eye, a possession of my heart.

Amelia Owens, can you hear me? Did you spirit me back to my bed or whatever? Time is time, space is space, that's unholy, but whatever. How could my heart be empty if all of my friends were in it?

How could the world be cold, so cold if the warmth of humanity always burnt like a furnace, kept burning as long as you ate and continued to breathe oxygen and expel carbon dioxide, synthesised all of the chemicals you needed to live normally? Happily? On a day to day basis.

Through the trickery, cruel machinery of the deep winter.

I raised the strength to get out of my bed, groggy, fully asleep, eyes not seeing but still seeing, the body moving with the order, the feeling of rightness and the knowledge of the real world that it needed to have with function.

(But I can't be in two places at once. Time is time, space is space. I can't end up like Carmen. I was the main character, so was she, and she used her powers to reach out desperately to people she simply wasn't person-like or sufficiently human enough to ever be able to understand or help, so she tampered with them for her own goals or amusement. She was part of that sick lot who believed so harshly in bettering others, the other faction that my parents and Amelia and maybe everyone else but my cute little friends belonged to, grouped together in history, pointless history even if their contingent goals were so disparate, anathematic, my enemies, Catharists who would never be able to see any Heaven on Earth-)

I came up to my window, past my princess curtains, past my actual curtains.

(And for my second I saw someone with auburn hair that blazed like another sun on my windowsill, but then I saw them in an old European city, with bright pretty hair and a sky that was grey and not tinged purple and towers and medieval architecture and then as physical as anything else the masoned minarets of tradition and ritual, etched-in in every age, as easy on the minds, as brilliant an architecture as any real. And then I blinked and the city faded into dust.)

You could tell a deep winter was a fake winter because right now it was raining, ehe. No, I'm kidding, like it had rained in the winters I had when I was a kid. The real ones, on the years without the deep winter phenomenon, although that phenomenon was older than I was.

It had started with the Bylight incident, the second of the trinity of rank 13s. The fictitious (they didn't know that allegedly but come on, you could tell. Oh, you couldn't? I'm sorry for being rank 7 I really didn't mean to be so good-) Latvian and Latgalian Army had demanded the reversal of the liberal language policy Latvia (along with Estonia, Lithuania) had negotiated with the defeated and West-looking Russia. It sought this through low level terrorism, the bombing of Russian-language schools, Orthodox churches, the cutting off of tongues "like the yama did to liars."

A distant cultural reference. Maybe the first sign that such a drastic nationalist campaign was possible but not real. That was hard to believe for those of us in the age of cities and broken nations, but Tamara had obsessed over the mundane histories to figure out the preternatural prophecies and explained the history of nationalism in the Baltics day after day for FUCKING WEEKS, I could never forget it.

The next sign was the number keeping. Bank balances from the Latvian numbers, but sometimes errors in recording would make them show up complex? So many euros plus i euros.

"I have a trillion imaginary euros," I had said.

"Well, you probably do. Esper." It wasn't dear prophetess. Tamara wasn't rank 0 (well, she wasn't an esper, so she wasn't a rank 0 candidate, they're the only ones you can guess the rank of before you awaken them), but she could imbibe in my light and retain her hostility. I'd usually hate that quality, but it's Tamara, it's admirable.

Anyway, like the temperature records in a deep winter, or the rainfall records in a deep winter, or the snowfall or the path of the sun or the stars in the sky or the changes of the foliage or the wildlife, strange things crawled through the patterns. If you were to tilt your head at one of the bank balances, or inspect one of their checks, you'd see deeply impossible things.

Deep, ehe. Of course it went deep, do you know how far rank 13 is beyond anything human? Rank 7 was our barrier.

No amount of lust for Europe could get any Russian government to okay a fascist militia slaughtering Russians, let's be real.

A strange phenomenon had happened during the Condor Raid.

...

A strange phenomenon involving nuclear weaponry had happened during the Condor Raid. During one of its aspects siege of New York, where the city clambered above the nation and earnt its right to continue to exist unlike so many other things, a low-yield nuclear weapon was detonated against it. The American army had been pretty desperate, hadn't it? So was East and Midwest's, huh!

Unexpectedly, it had killed the damn bird immediately. But its corpse lay there and continued to move, unaffected by our laws. It declared its own, the Edict of Ultrablue.

Brighton Beach remained under its spell.

A strange phenomenon began to work against the Latvian and Latgalian Army.

Russian intelligence became absolutely convinced of the support of the Latvian government for the terrorists. Actually, they had absolutely convincing evidence.

More than that, the evidence illustrated that the terrorists were absolutely possessed by a strange animosity. It was infinitely behind, infinitely beyond human conflicts. Maybe it was hatred of humanity. Maybe this was just the form it took when it took this orientation in our dimension. All you had to do that was look at the patterns and past them, and enter mentally, physically, they're the same thing (time is time, space is space) into the world of the anomalies, of ESP.

In any case, the FGPU had seen what happened to America. Wouldn't Europe side with them against a Latvian government which revoked humanity for a temporary edge? After all the political concessions, the economic concessions, the treaties that ensured an imperialist Russia could never exist again...

A warm August. (Did you know that's from the same root word as authority, auctoritas, augere? Oh, sorry, Carmen, nobody fucking cares...)

It's sweet. This sweetness was probably ensured by climate change, but did that matter? We have free energy now, even if we have unfree reality, and wasn't it better than the cascade of rain on my windowsill, flowing with strange and sickening patterns, with a bitter chill beyond emptying the world of energy?

Don't get used to it.

Russian nuclear command felt so just. And more than that, they could see the accursed city.

It was Latvia's second city, Daugavspils. Only it wasn't, really.

Daugavspils belonged to humanity. The city they saw in their dreams after conferring with the FGPU, the Duma, the rest of the GRU, did not. It was beyond flaws, beyond life or death or the home of necromancers. Scientific witches, even?

Hate, since that's what they called that strange side of the thing that possessed (or spoilers, one of the components of the things that made) the Latvian and Latgalian Army, lied there. So it was 'hostile', or 'lacked good intentions.' Europe knew anomalies were consciousness from the strange events that had rebounded from the Condor Raid.

That city could not be allowed to exist.

It would be fine. Nuclear tests done between 2040 and 2043, the year of our story, let's not get so lazy about time (is time and space is space) shielded humanity from the radiation spread by nuclear weapons.

Oh, tests? I meant the strange patterns on the reading that only Russian nuclear command could see, keep up. Or don't. Astrakhov and his allies were awake. The rest of the Russian military were asleep. Only force of arms could wake them.

Only psychic power could save the president, who was read and had lines inserted into him, whose commands cleared the way for the limited strike, the first against an inhabited target since Nagasaki.

Not a word got out of Russia until his speech, a speech that scorched the world like the speech of President ∅, number fifty-three.

(Mom, Dad, why do you think I don't want to get anywhere near politics? I'm the most important person in my world. I care about the Relevant, and now I see I'm really capitalising it, not the Important, although I feel an urge, vague gravitational attraction? Did Owens graft that on to me. Agh! Sloppy. Disgusting.)

The European army wasn't watching, no, not in the slightest. So they didn't notice when two hundred thousand people disappeared.

Disappeared? Yes. Look through the radioactive dust. That's not a mirage. It's very real, even to unawakened eyes, even to the eyes of the many rank 0s who walk around this warped world seemingly untouched but actually not able to fight back.

Pull back the curtain of dust. There it is! The second city the Russian generals saw or prophesied in their dreams! The perfect one, but not humanity's perfection. A wondrous city without life or death but with necromancers, revealed to the whole world at once!

The Duma pulled a rotting copy of the Collected Works of Stalin from the garbage, purged the military. Ehe, Ehehehe. What good would that do at this point? The shock of the blast gave pattern searchers across Europe, even in China, India, Australia and Toronto a revelation, a weapon, one that prevented the bastards from suckering themselves in so, so deeply. There was no need.

The devil esquire crawled from Lake Baikal. It perched for six hours and sixty-six minutes (indivisible) and began to talk.

The shock of the blast gave psychic power a weapon. The fictitious Latvian and Latgalian Army lost its secret command, sure, but the anomalies cutting through their world then figured out how to come up with as many armies as they needed trials. So Eurasia went to war up until the sky over Bethlehem dripped paint in 2046.

Up until?

Once the devil began to talk, his cruel worlds turned into storm clouds or enchanting snowfalls. That caused the warm August to fade. That was the deep winter, cruelty or the nuclear bomb!

(And only one other had been fired since, because I wasn't Tamara, I didn't study these things I reminisced and saw weird sights in my dreams. That was the Democratic People Republic of Korea's siren song before reunification. It, of course, was immediately consumed by the Edict.)

Ah. Fuah.

Were my eyes really open. I touched the window, jerked back from the frost.

Don't worry. Since I was full of light, I was full of warmth☆~.

I wouldn't succumb to the cruelty or meddling of others. I could weather the weather. I would weather the weather for everyone.

I would beat History and Importance, even if their fragments surfaced. I would pass high school. I wouldn't drop out, I wouldn't try exceptionally hard. I would brighten others days. I wouldn't outshine them. I wouldn't blot out the world anymore than I had to maintain my private Heaven of thirty-four or so people. Maybe thirty-seven. It seemed like a good idea. I'd break past my instincts. I'd break past Owens' instincts.

A draught crept in. Still, I felt determined. That was Monday. Tuesday would pass.

I was so very sleepy, still.

Well, I had fainted in class, of course I would be.

Tamara was the only person I had told about Amelia, but the holy quintet would mention it in the group chat, so everything would be okay.

Maybe I should make sure it was okay. I was so very sleepy, but I could reach out and reorder things in my dreams. I was an esper, a prophetess, a healer. I had to make sure everyone was health! Had enough magic to go through their lives. That Amelia hadn't done anything more untowards to ensure that I would have to Act.

But, but.

I crawled back into bed. Changed out of my stiffer outside clothes into a nightie. Went to sleep.

 

---

 

Humanity's perfect musician or the perfect musician of human annihilation?

A self-proclaimed stray or guard dog.

A listless boy looking for another system of magic.

His girlfriend, who tires of her dutiless sisters, who is willing to burn her everything for love.

A full girl who loves psychic power, can record it, can't feel it, is willing to do anything for it.

A girl who doesn't care about her.

Her oldest sisters.

Their younger sisters.

The researchers all around them, who will ensure humanity and its reality spans galaxies, survives eternity.

Other sets of sisters?

Someone, something like all that. So many things like that.

Nobody controls fate. Everyone chooses their own fate, after all.

A rank 7 can blot that out.

Your light can blot that out.

It has to, or you'll be.

ARC ONE START