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Historian Mira Vyexil Journals of House Celeste
> One of the oldest surviving records of the time of CATACLYSM
Salvaged Entry 1: The Awakening of the Earth
"None of us saw it coming. When the Earth stirred, we thought it was just a tremor. As if we hadn't already had enough ‘natural disasters’ to deal with. Then the sky, yes, the sky broke open like some kind of bad joke. I swear, if I hadn’t seen it myself, I would’ve called it absurd. But no, the ground began to shift too, and we realized we were living on a planet that was alive. Aware. And just like that, we were punished for centuries of treating it like a disposable doormat."
Looking back, the beginning of the Cataclysm feels almost unreal. I mean, how do you even prepare for the Earth itself turning sentient? Spoiler alert: you don’t. At first, the tremors were mild. We chalked it up to regular tectonic activity. "Oh, it’s just the Earth doing its thing," we said. You know, the usual geologist chatter. Then, of course, came the day. Fifty years ago, and I still have nightmares about it. The tremors turned violent like the planet was waking up from the world's worst hangover. The sky didn’t just crack, it shattered.
The Earth didn’t just shift; it groaned, as if it had been asleep for eons and was now stretching, cracking its back, and saying, “You humans have overstayed your welcome.” People who were there say they felt the ground move differently. Not like an earthquake, but like the planet was actually shrugging us off. A few survivors I interviewed described it as... unsettling. Yeah, that’s one way to put it. I’d have called it "Oh my gods, we’re screwed."
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Salvaged Entry 2: The First Signs
We should’ve known something was wrong. The air, for starters, had this heaviness, like when you’re about to get bad news but you don’t know it yet. It pressed down on us like the atmosphere itself was giving us a warning, a slow build-up to the cosmic punchline. The birds stopped flying. That should’ve been the dead giveaway pun intended. And the animals, well, they weren’t exactly subtle. Restless, nervous, like they knew something we didn’t. Which, frankly, they did. The trees though, that's where it got creepy.
Marsha Elins, a tough survivor, one of those ‘I’ve seen it all’ types, told me how the forests in America started acting... off. "The trees... they started to grow in ways I'd never seen before," she said. It wasn’t just the branches twisting unnaturally—oh no, it was worse. She swore the leaves were watching her. Now, I don’t know about you, but if I’m walking through a forest and the foliage starts eyeing me, I’m running. But she stuck it out. Until the roots broke free and started moving. Yeah, crawling like snakes. That’s when Marsha decided it was time to pack up and leave. Smart woman.
The reports kept pouring in.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Africa’s deserts shifting like sand dunes with a mind of their own, swallowing entire villages whole. The Amazon? It didn’t just grow, it became hungry. Vines pulling people in like they were on some kind of aggressive plant crusade. There’s no real way to describe that level of bizarreness except it sucked.
And then the animals followed suit. The predators got bigger. Some sprouted extra eyes, others grew talons sharper than steel. The prey, well, they evolved too. Horns, spikes, fangs where none had ever been before. Like nature was giving us a reality check: ‘Survive this, if you can.’
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Salvaged Entry 3: The Fall of Civilization
So, you’d think the whole world turning into a nightmare would be the worst part, right? Wrong.
The real kicker was watching civilization collapse like a sandcastle in the rising tide. One-quarter of humanity just... poof. Gone. They didn’t even have time to react. Cities crumbled. Buildings, with all our marvelous ingenuity, couldn’t withstand the Earth’s tantrum. Skyscrapers fell like toys. And let’s not talk about the floods. Rivers and lakes rebelled against the dams, breaking free and swallowing whole regions.
I met a soldier once, Lieutenant Gregor Sloan, stationed in the Australian outback. The guy survived, but barely.
"We tried to maintain control," he said, "but the beasts came first. Mutated kangaroos..."
And, look, I tried to keep a straight face, but mutated kangaroos? It sounded like something out of a child's twisted wet fantasy. But he wasn’t joking. They were massive. And when the land started breaking apart? Convoys, people, everything just swallowed whole. The Earth, literally and metaphorically, had had enough of us.
Australia, like so many other places, became a no-man's land. Entire continents poof.
One day they were there, the next, they were nightmares on a map.
And then the Hydra oh, we’ll get to that monstrosity later claimed the entire region. Those who made it out still can’t talk about it without breaking down. Heads for days, each one more terrifying than the last.
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Salvaged Entry 4: The Energies
Then, amidst all the madness, humans stumbled onto something because we always find something, don’t we? We realized that this weird energy, the one warping everything, could be... used. Yeah, some bright minds figured out that we could interact with it. Not me, though. I just wrote about it.
The kids were the first to change. Ironic, right? The youngest ones adapted quickest, feeling the energy like a second heartbeat.
Some could manipulate it, shaping it, like some kind of primal magic. People were scared of them at first, of course. Nothing new there. If something’s different, humanity either fears it or tries to destroy it.
Marla Chen, a researcher out of Beijing, documented the shift.
"It was the children," she wrote. "They could feel it, bend it. For those who couldn’t? They died." She’s blunt like that. Either you evolved, or you didn’t. And if you didn’t, well, nature wasn’t waiting around.
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Salvaged Entry 5: ##$!@@
The Earth had officially reclaimed itself, and we were left with a choice to evolve or perish. I guess we managed to survive, barely. But the world we knew? It’s gone. Forever. Now, it’s a living, breathing thing, and we’re just trying to stay on its good side.
The Cataclysm wasn’t just the world changing. It was the Earth’s way of saying, “You had your chance. Now it’s my turn.” And so, here we are. A new era. A terrifying one, but hey, we made it this far, right?
Let’s see how long we last.
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