Fate Weaver's convergence

Prologue

howdy all, as of 05/06/23 this is the new prologue chapter. As time passes ill be pushing out rewrites of each of V1's chapters. The primary focus is the first 20 or so chapters.

If you want to go further, feel free to join the discord: https://discord.gg/7zGW8WVdAh

Where did things go wrong?

I asked myself, staring into the distance.

Education... apprenticeship... tech school... it was all smooth sailing. All it should have taken was some application and hard work. I'd done it right!

I looked to my left, a wall covered from floor to ceiling with photographs. They were all veterans of the war. People who were already processed through this facility, and released from service.

Heroes, we're all heroes. But why us?

All throughout history, at least to our knowledge, nothing as perplexing as dimensional tears occurred. That was our generation's war, no others.

Did it start with the pandemic?

I rotated the can if snuff in my hands, using it to occupy myself. The anxiety of sitting still was kept at bay with it.

It was around the time the last Mars rover landed. Nothing seemed amiss, all the major news cycles continued airing story after story...

I knew the answer, but somehow the contemplation on the war's start was calming. It was easier for me to rationalize the war as a 'what to avoid' subject. It was less so a warranted topic outside of that. There was no point in discussing how things were now. Nothing could change that. But it was infinitely more comforting to think 'we can stop this from happening again'

It all started with a media blackout of a particular country as far as anyone can remember. It was well before anyone could truly discover it, so by the time your average person learned of events the original perpetrator was already in a sea of irradiated cobalt.

But of all things, it could never stop what occurred next from changing humanity forever.

The rifts...

Dimensional tears, the match point of scientific exploration outside of space travel. That was the widely established theory of the war's cause. Regardless of how logical it seemed or not. The one tear was all it took to throw everything into chaos. Theories on the wider scale of the 'Rifting' was left to two theories. Either A, it was a result of multiple coordinated versions of the original rift. Or B, the single original rift destabilized our realm enough to make a series of additional tears throughout the world.

What did they expect? Some new frontier? Or if it was intentional, did they believe it would enable conquest? The next world super-power?

Within the first year the world failed to adequately address the threat, caught too much within its old ways of political scheming and economic conquest. By the time anyone truly considered the threat seriously, rifts had already formed throughout the world.

Sungrinders were the first to show their horrifying capabilities, emerging within multiple metropolitan areas, decimating anything in their path. In the panic, numerous countries warred with each other in the belief that the sudden explosive carnage was the fault of the work of conventional weapons. Then, as the world was recovering from the trauma of the initial cataclysm, waves of mutated beasts spilled from the ruins. It was as if the earth itself voided the monster's of hell from its gullet.

Six years. I was still young. There's no way this could compare to those before me, but still...

I looked to my hand, planted on my knee as I anxiously bounced it up and down. It was the only leg I could still move in such a manner. The other was so unresponsive that I struggled to feel so much as a warm bath. It had no nervous perception, the doctors laying claim to its near amputation.