It was a dark and stormy night, bats were flying through the sky and wolves were howling at the moon.

I was hurriedly going back to the safety of hearth when out of nowhere, a bolt of lightning illuminated the landscape.

And in the stroboscopic light of the thunderstorm, I could see...

"Aw, come on, this is ridiculous. Cut down on the melodrama, please," Adde complained.

"No ! I will not let you disparage melodrama ! Melodrama is good, and..."

"But it's completely inappropriate, Yan ! You can't write that in a memoir !"

"Yes I can. And inappropriate drama is best drama," I stated, with the kind of self-assurance that comes from wanting someone to believe you say the truth, despite lying through your teeth.

"That doesn't even mean anything. Anyway, this shit is probably going to go in the history books. You want that sort of writing to be remembered, do you ?"

"Okay, Adde, I'm going to change it."

Adde was right, unsurprisingly. I couldn't treat this as a joke.

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It was night. I was cooking. Then out of nowhere, I woke up in the middle of a magic circle. There were people standing in a circle around me. It was weird. Fire is hot, and water is wet. I am writing very plainly.

"I did not mean write beige prose, Yan."

"Oh ? And what then did you mean ?"

Adde sighed. She seems tired of this. Then again, so am I. "Why can't you just write something normal and be done with it..."

I grimaced and explained : "I actually have very little experience writing in a litterature sense. Everything I ever wrote seriously was more engineering-oriented, you know, so beige prose was considered the proper way to write..."

"Humm..." Adde actually stopped and seriously thought over it. Then she said slowly, speaking while thinking about what she was saying, "Try speaking your story, remembering it as it happened, and then tell the story as it happened. I doubt anyone will hold it against you if your writing is a bit plain... But writing this as it happened is important. As in, this book is probably the first thing people will read in the future when they want to learn about the War."

I stopped and stared at the blank page.

Then I glanced back at Adde. She was far older now than she was when I first met her.

I looked back at the page.

I had grown older, too. And over the course of the Great War, the world had changed so incredibly fast... Could it be ? That people would forget how the world was before ? So soon ?

I took my pen.

I hope there are actual historians who recorded the event, because I have no idea what I'm doing.

And I started to write.

I came to in the middle of a smoke-filled room. This was not a usual thing for me...