It happened in fits and starts. Buried in tabloids, alongside articles on bat-boy and alien abductions. The man who self-combusted but didn't burn his house down. The woman that disappeared in broad daylight, car crashing into a bus stop. Little things, like a pale moon tinted red. Wolves sighted in large cities baying at the moonlight.
Fissures in reality, home to dark spirits and glowing eyes. Someone had invoked an ancient spell, rubbed a talisman, drawn pentacles in the dirt with dripping blood of a new sacrifice. Then came the dark times. Panic and chaos, the "norms" and the "enchanted". Depending on who was telling the story, the normals were either blessed or doomed.
In just a few years, everyone was converted. Except me.
I'm only alive because of my cunning and an industrial-strength faraday cage, enhanced with helmholtz coils at varying angles. Every necromancer and wizard had a blind spot, and it was based on field strengths and differentials. That's how they can't find me when I'm sleeping. The math is complex, but I can't claim credit.
I stumbled on an advanced weapons lab in my travels, blueprints and notes next to dessicated corpses. The rumors were the spiritual plane was given ingress from inter-dimensional tampering. We may never know for sure.
After the grand convergence, those seeking power replaced elected officials, police and the military. Laws were passed to hunt down the "norms", declaring the future belonged to those with enchantment abilities. Normals were rounded up and summarily banished to spectral planes, or turned into mindless servants.
That was the hardest part, seeing someone I had known for years shuffle by on the street, shopping basket in one hand, scrawled list in the other. They sent them on errands, vacant husks doing their masters bidding. Some were brutally executed for sport, made to walk into traffic or plunge into the ocean.
I swore I would never let that happen to me.
Embedded in my back molar was a sealed capsule. If my back was against the wall with no other options, I would bite down hard and let the poison do its work. Anything would be better than being a lobotomized errand boy. Daily life was a mixture of scavenging on the edges, and searching for others like myself.
Necromancy was as normal as hailing a cab.
Teenagers would ride multi-legged horrors like skateboards. Smartphones became digital familiars, doing the bidding of restless warlocks and witches. During the dark times, I destroyed every piece of technology I had. Wispy tendrils would emerge from screens and bind with their users. Some were given power, others were made into fleshy puppets.
Its funny how you can get used to something. I could never relax my guard, though. Even walking outside, I had to wear specially made clothes embedded with meshes and other magnetic shields. My current home was in a rusting junkyard. Miles of scrap metal and wire. I tunneled under a large heap of crushed cars, fashioning a small room where my coils and cage shielded me.
Not much of a life, I know. But I didn't have any choice. I was going to fight back. Slowly but surely, clearing an entire block, then later an entire district. I had the materials, all I needed was time. A woven mesh here, some hand-wound coils there.
I gradually sectioned off some of the buildings on the outskirts. Lovecraftian horrors floating by in the skies, oblivious to my plans. Its the reason that I searched for people like you, to induct them into the normal army.
All you need is the will to fight.
So, how about it?
