Veil of Divinity - Preview

The phone slipped from Matt's trembling fingers, clattering against the frost-etched windowsill of his hostel room in Reykjavik. He lunged to catch it before it fell, his breath fogging the glass in irregular bursts. Outside, the predawn darkness shifted with something impossible.

"Holy shit, you guys seeing this?" he whispered, voice cracking into something like a prayer as he steadied his livestream.

Beyond the window, colors that shouldn't exist twisted through cloud formations with mathematical precision. Perfect circles pulsed within triangles that rotated through spirals, each shape dissolving into the next with a coherence that made Matt's eyes water. The light wasn't random—that was what terrified him. Aurora displays were supposed to be beautiful chaos, nature's improvisation. But this... this was intentional. The formations wrote themselves across the sky with the cold deliberation of an equation solving itself in real time.

As Matt panned left to right, his camera captured the moment when the display seemed to breathe—expanding and contracting like the respiration of some vast, aerial organism. The sensation of being watched prickled across his skin.

"It's like..." his voice dropped to a whisper, "it's like the sky is breathing."

The comment section on his Instagram Live exploded. Matt's phone grew hot in his palm as notifications overwhelmed the system.

@NightSkyWatcher: Is this some kind of filter or AR effect? 
@AstronomyNow: This violates everything we know about atmospheric phenomena. 
@Norse_Mythology_Prof: Those are ancient symbols. That central formation is Yggdrasil. 
@RationalSkeptic: Obviously a hoax. Formations that precise don't occur naturally.

Matt pressed his forehead against the cold glass, unable to look away from the hypnotic dance above. "I swear to God this is real," he said, his voice steadier now despite the cold sweat beading on his forehead. "Something's happening. Something big."

He wasn't wrong.
________________________________________

Guðrun Jónsdóttir's arthritic knees predicted the tremor twenty minutes before it hit. She was already pulling on her boots when the first vibration rattled the dishes in her kitKim cabinet.

"This one's wrong," she told her grandson as she shuffled to the window, joints protesting. The boy looked up from his phone, the eerie light from outside casting shadows across his face that made him look older than his fourteen years.

Her three cats had vanished hours ago, wedging themselves beneath her bed when the lights first appeared. Now she understood why. Outside, the geometric formations had intensified, their angles too perfect, their movements too deliberate.

"This feels like the old stories," Guðrun murmured, touching the worn protective rune that hung around her neck—a habit from childhood she'd never outgrown. "When the World Tree trembled before Ragnarök."

"Amma, please," her grandson sighed, the eye-roll evident in his voice even as his fingers flew across his phone, sharing Matt's livestream with friends. "It's probably just some weird solar flare or..."

The world split open with a sound that wasn't really a sound at all, it was more like silence turning itself inside out. The shock wave knocked Guðrun back a step, her hand clutching the windowsill. Her grandson's phone went dead, screen black as obsidian.

"Get your sister," Guðrun ordered, her voice carrying an authority that brooked no teenage defiance. "We're going to the cellar."

The kitKim light flickered once, twice, then died. In the darkness, only the impossible light from outside remained, casting long geometric shadows across the worn floorboards.
________________________________________

Dr. Helena Kristjánsdóttir's hands betrayed her before her face did. The chief meteorologist for RÚV News had faced the emergency broadcast camera countless times during Iceland's temperamental weather events and volcanic activities. But as the lens caught her now, her fingers tightened around her report papers, crinkling the data printouts she'd been clutching since the first anomalous readings appeared an hour ago.

Behind her, monitoring equipment displayed numbers scrolling in sequences that made her face drain of color. One particular reading pulsed with rhythmic regularity that meteorological data should never display.

"Þetta er..." she muttered in Icelandic, staring at the monitors. "Þetta er ekki..."

This isn't...

Someone off-camera whispered urgently, reminding her they were still live. Helena forced her professional mask back into place, though the effort made the corners of her mouth twitch.

"We are tracking unprecedented atmospheric anomalies above the Reykjavik region," she said, her English crisp but strained. "The light formation appears to be interacting with the magnetosphere in ways we have not observed before."

The word escaped before she could contain it, pulled from some ancestral memory rather than her scientific vocabulary.

"Yggdrasil," she whispered, then immediately composed herself. "We recommend citizens remain indoors while we continue to monitor the situation. Updates will follow as data can be verified."

As soon as the camera light blinked off, Helena ripped her earpiece out and turned to her colleague.

"The measurements are impossible," she hissed, jabbing her finger at the screen where the anomalous readings continued their perfect, rhythmic pulsation. "These numbers suggest conditions that cannot exist in our atmosphere."

"We're getting similar reports from stations across Europe," her colleague replied, his face illuminated by the blue glow of his monitor. "Whatever this is, it's spreading."
________________________________________

The Icelandic Meteorological Office's response began with textbook crisis management: carefully worded statements, assurances of "monitoring the situation" and "conducting thorough analyses." But as their instruments recorded phenomena that fell outside every established parameter, their updates became increasingly erratic.
Their website crashed at 4:17 AM after their lead scientist posted raw data with a single line of commentary: "Cannot verify readings. Equipment possibly compromised. Numbers suggest conditions that cannot exist."
Their final update before digital silence was both clinical and devastating in its implications: "Observing unprecedented atmospheric anomalies above Reykjavik region. Standard meteorological classifications insufficient. Exercise caution. Updates to follow when data can be verified."

The scientific community's carefully maintained façade of understanding was beginning to crack, and everyone could see it.
________________________________________

At 4:36 AM, Keilir mountain tore itself apart.

Guðrun felt it first, a vibration that didn't travel through the ground but seemed to resonate directly in her bones. In the cellar, her grandchildren huddled against her, their eyes wide in the dim light of their emergency lantern.
"Amma?" the girl whispered. "Is it an earthquake?"

Guðrun stroked her granddaughter's hair. "No, child. This is something older."

Above them, the house creaked and groaned, but not from any tremor Guðrun recognized—and she'd lived through Eyjafjallajökull and Bárðarbunga, knew the different ways a volcano could wake up. This felt different, as if the air itself had suddenly gained weight.

Through the small cellar window, a new light became visible—not the geometric formations that had first appeared, but something incandescent and wrong. Guðrun moved to the window, her arthritic knees forgotten as she peered outside.

The initial blast punched through the cloud cover with impossible force, a column of fire erupting from Keilir's perfect cone shape, visible even from Reykjavik. The mountain that had stood dormant for countless centuries, its distinctive silhouette a landmark on the Reykjanes Peninsula, was now awakening with terrifying purpose. Local legends had long whispered that Keilir marked an entrance to the underworld, its conical form resembling an ancient burial mound where the boundaries between realms grew thin. Few took such stories seriously until now, as they watched molten rock and superheated gas twist in mid-air like a living thing, coiling and writhing against the backdrop of that already impossible sky. The fire pulled in on itself, defying gravity, forming a burning pillar that pulsed with its own internal rhythm.

"The fire's moving wrong," her grandson whispered, pressing against her side to see through the window. The terrified quaver in his voice made him sound young again, not the teenager who typically responded to everything with practiced indifference.

He was right. The magma behaved as though guided by unseen forces, defying fundamental principles that had governed every eruption since Earth formed. This wasn't just unusual volcanic activity—it was a violation of what scientists considered immutable natural law.

Where the eruption met the atmospheric light show, reality seemed to stutter. The two phenomena attracted and repelled each other like magnets flipping poles, creating formations that hurt to look at directly. Colors that had no business existing in nature—colors that seemed to extend beyond the visible spectrum—rippled through the tower of fire.

"We need to go deeper," Guðrun said, pulling her grandchildren away from the window. "Away from the light."
But even as she led them to the back of the cellar, she couldn't help glancing over her shoulder one last time. The formations above had changed. Ancient symbols appeared in the aurora: fragments that resembled runes, hieroglyphs, cuneiform, and other primordial writing systems, all interconnected by branches that looked disturbingly like Yggdrasil, the World Tree from Norse mythology.

Watching it felt like seeing language being born, like witnessing the moment when mankind first learned to write on cave walls—only this was being written on the sky itself, in fire and light and impossibility.
________________________________________

Local volcanologists would later report that their equipment had simply stopped recording at 4:36 AM when Keilir erupted. Seismographs flatlined. Chemical sensors went dark. It was as if the instruments had collectively decided that whatever was happening fell so far outside their parameters that they simply gave up trying to measure it. The only records of those first few minutes came from human witnesses, and even they struggled to put into words what they were seeing. The event resisted documentation, defied categorization. It simply was, and it was wrong.
What made the eruption even more perplexing was Keilir's geological history—or rather, its lack thereof. The mountain, standing about 30 kilometers southwest of Reykjavik, had no recorded eruptions in human history.

​

Geologists had long classified it not as an active volcano but as a hyaloclastite ridge formed during subglacial eruptions in the last Ice Age. Its distinctive silhouette, visible from the capital on clear days, had made it a landmark and navigation point for centuries, but never a threat. Until now.
________________________________________

CNN's Anderson Cooper was in mid-sentence during a rerun about deep-sea mining when the feed cut to black, then snapped to their emergency broadcast studio. The night desk anchor, Jessica Souter, looked like she'd just run to the set—her blazer slightly askew, coffee cup still in hand.

"We're receiving reports of an unprecedented geological event in Iceland," she started, then stopped as her earpiece crackled with updates. Her eyes widened as she watched the first footage roll in.

"What you're seeing is live from Reykjavik, where what appears to be a volcanic eruption is... behaving in ways that experts are struggling to explain." She paused, choosing her words carefully, her professional training battling with the sheer impossibility of what she was seeing on the monitor. 

The BBC's programming died more elegantly, fading to their familiar breaking news theme as veteran anchor Margaret Howard appeared, her usual unflappable demeanor cracking slightly at the edges.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we apologize for the interruption. We're going live to Reykjavik where—" She paused, squinting at something off-camera. "Are we certain these feeds are authentic?"

Someone behind the camera must have confirmed, because Margaret straightened her shoulders and continued, though a new tightness appeared around her eyes. "What you're seeing appears to be a volcanic eruption unlike any previously documented. The magma appears to be defying known physical properties, and there are reports of unusual atmospheric phenomena occurring simultaneously."
________________________________________

Social media descended into beautiful chaos. A trucker named Pavel livestreamed from the Ring Road, his dashcam catching the moment when a tendril of aurora light reached down like a finger and touched the column of fire. His string of Polish expletives was cut short as his truck's electrical system flickered and died, headlights dimming to nothing on the empty stretch of highway.

Three teenagers filming from a Reykjavik parking garage captured the geometric formations beginning to form in the sky—perfect circles and triangles that stretched for miles, spinning like some vast combination lock. Their excited commentary turned to nervous whispers as the shapes began to move faster, blurring and overlapping in ways that made viewers' screens glitch and stutter.

The official Instagram account of the Blue Lagoon resort, usually dedicated to idyllic spa photos, went live as the formations reflected in the milky-blue water, creating mirror images that seemed to stretch down forever. Their social media manager, still in pajamas, narrated in increasingly shaky English as guests gathered at the water's edge, phones raised skyward despite the staff's attempts to hustle them inside.

"For your safety, please return to your rooms," she repeated, her voice growing more strained as no one moved. "Please, this is not a normal aurora display."

But no one listened. They stood transfixed, faces bathed in impossible light, phones recording footage that would later show nothing but digital static.

A security camera outside a 10-11 convenience store caught the moment when a local dog walker stopped in the middle of the street, his three Irish setters sitting in perfect unison, all staring upward as the lights began to pulse in synchronized rhythm. The dogs didn't bark. They didn't move. They just watched, and somehow their stillness was more unsettling than any reaction would have been.
________________________________________

The scientific community's response unfolded like a case study in cognitive dissonance. Dr. Rebecca Kim from MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences went on CNN first, armed with charts and preliminary data about magma composition. Halfway through explaining how unusual mineral concentrations might account for the color variations, she stopped mid-sentence, staring at the live feed playing behind her.

"That's... that's not possible," she muttered, forgetting she was still on air. "The silica content would have to be... no, that's not possible."

At Caltech's Seismological Laboratory, Dr. James Rodriguez led an emergency team analyzing the seismic data—or trying to. Their instruments showed contradictory readings: simultaneous upward and downward ground movement, pressure waves that seemed to cancel themselves out, vibrations that followed patterns more like music than geological events. By 5 AM, he'd thrown his glasses onto his desk in frustration.

"It's like the volcano is quantum tunneling," he said during an impromptu press conference, running his hands through his disheveled hair. "And I know how insane that sounds."

A reporter raised her hand. "Could you explain that for our viewers, Dr. Rodriguez?"

He sighed, gathering his thoughts. "In normal physics, objects can't pass through barriers without enough energy to break through them. A ball can't roll through a wall. But in quantum physics, at the subatomic level, particles can sometimes pass through barriers they shouldn't be able to penetrate—like a ghost walking through a solid wall. It's as if they disappear on one side and reappear on the other without traveling the distance between."

He gestured helplessly at the monitors displaying impossible data. "Keilir's magma is behaving like it's ignoring fundamental barriers of physics. Material is appearing where it shouldn't be possible, moving in ways that violate everything we understand about how matter behaves at a macro scale. It's as if the rules that separate quantum reality from our everyday world have... thinned somehow."

The atmospheric science community descended into academic chaos. Dr. Elena Petrov from the Russian Academy of Sciences posted a series of increasingly frantic tweets about electromagnetic readings that defied Maxwell's equations. "These are the fundamental laws that govern all electric and magnetic phenomena," she explained in a hastily typed tweet. "They tell us how electric and magnetic fields behave and interact—how light propagates, how radio works, how all electromagnetic energy moves through space.” But what was happening over Keilir violated these bedrock principles. The Northern Lights themselves seemed to be generating their own magnetic field, one that pulsed in patterns that looked disturbingly like binary code.

Three different supercomputers crashed while trying to model the phenomenon. The error messages themselves formed perfect geometric sequences across the screens before the systems went dark.

Dr. Hans Weber at the European Space Agency stood surrounded by his team as satellite data showed what looked like micro-singularities forming and dissolving in milliseconds above the eruption site. Normally the most conservative of scientists, Weber was caught on a hot mic saying, "It's like someone's rewriting physics in real-time," as he stared at readings that should have been impossible.

The scientific discourse devolved further as experts tried to mesh their specialized knowledge with what they were actually seeing:

"The magma's behaving more like a superfluid than molten rock," Dr. Marcus Wong, vulcanologist at the University of Hawaii, said during a hastily arranged video conference. The bags under his eyes suggested he hadn't slept since the first reports.

"We're recording electromagnetic frequencies that match ancient Schumann resonance patterns, but amplified by factors of thousands," Dr. Fatima Al-Rashid, atmospheric physicist, reported from her lab in Cairo, the geometric lights visible even through her office window thousands of miles from Iceland.

"The spectrographic analysis shows elements that... well, they don't exist. They don't fit anywhere on the periodic table," Dr. Thomas Miller, chemical analyst at CERN, admitted as he recalibrated his equipment for the third time, certain it must be malfunctioning.

"These formations follow mathematical sequences we've seen in ancient architecture—from the Pyramids to Göbekli Tepe—but with a complexity that suggests they're part of a larger system," Dr. Amelia Rosenthal, archaeomathematician, observed as she compared the aerial footage to her lifelong research on ancient numerical systems.

Mainstream scientific publications struggled to keep up. Nature rushed out a special digital edition within hours titled "The Iceland Event: Preliminary Observations," but had to retract it three hours later when half the data spontaneously changed. Scientific American's website crashed under the weight of submissions from researchers around the world, each offering theories that ranged from quantum field disruptions to micro-wormholes to temporary suspensions of fundamental forces.

By dawn, the global scientific consensus had fractured into three camps: those frantically trying to force the phenomenon into existing models, those admitting they were completely out of their depth, and those sitting in stunned silence, watching their careers' worth of understanding crumble in the face of something that simply should not be.

The most honest response came from Dr. Richard Feynman III at Princeton, whose entire statement to the press consisted of four words: "We don't understand this."

It would turn out to be the most accurate scientific assessment of the day.
________________________________________

By sunrise in Iceland—a wan, sickly light that seemed afraid to compete with the ongoing spectacle—the eruption had settled into an unsettling rhythm. The volcanic column pulsed like a massive heartbeat: sixty beats per minute, exactly, as more than one observer noted. But it was the light show that commanded attention, evolving from mere geometric formations into something far more provocative.

Sister Mary Catherine, watching CNN's live feed from her monastery in Vermont, dropped her morning coffee when a perfect Celtic cross materialized in the sky, held for exactly twelve seconds, then dissolved into spiraling Hebrew letters that her shaking hands couldn't photograph fast enough. Her phone, brand new, displayed only static.

In Cairo, Islamic scholars at Al-Azhar University gathered in courtyards, watching livestreams as ancient Aramaic script wove through the aurora, followed by what several experts swore was perfect Kufic calligraphy spelling out verses never recorded in any known text. Every attempt to document these moments produced corrupted files or phones that simply shut down.

A group of Sanskrit experts in New Delhi began cataloging the symbols, trying to match them with known religious iconography. Their whiteboard filled with tallies: the Om symbol appeared seventeen times, the Christian ichthys twelve, Thor's hammer manifested between bursts of what looked like cuneiform script. Pictures turned to digital soup, video became unwatchable static, but they kept counting.

Throughout it all, the image of a vast tree—branches extending upward into the sky, roots reaching down into the earth—appeared and reappeared, dominating the display. Norse mythology experts were quick to identify it as Yggdrasil, the World Tree that connected all nine realms of existence.
________________________________________

Daniel Cade was doing what he did best—making a politician squirm.

It was just past 4 AM in Manhattan, and he'd been grilling a West Coast senator who'd agreed to a pre-dawn interview, probably hoping the early hour would mean a gentler Cade. A foolish assumption.

The overhead lights in the studio cast harsh shadows across Cade's face, emphasizing the intensity in his dark eyes as he leaned forward, ignoring the cue from his producer to wrap up. Throughout his career, he'd built a reputation as 'The Inquisitor,' a journalist who excelled at exposing frauds, debunking supernatural claims, and holding the powerful accountable to empirical reality.

"So you're saying, Senator, that despite three independent studies demonstrating elevated cancer rates in communities surrounding your donor's manufacturing plants, you still maintain there's no link?" Cade's voice carried the precise balance of skepticism and practiced cordiality that had become his trademark.

The senator shifted uncomfortably. "What I'm saying, Mr. Cade, is that correlation doesn't equal causation, and my committee has..."

Cade's phone vibrated on the desk between them. He never checked messages during interviews; a point of professional pride. But something about the rapid sequence of alerts drew his eye downward.

The senator seized the momentary distraction. "As I was saying, my committee has reviewed the evidence and found that environmental factors unrelated to the manufacturing process could explain..."

But Cade wasn't listening anymore. The news alert about Iceland lit up his phone, accompanied by video footage that made his hands go cold despite the overheated studio. Something in the formations made his chest tighten with a terrible sense of recognition.

The geometric forms in that sky looked eerily similar to the drawings his mother had obsessively created before her breakdown fifteen years ago—the same drawings that had led him to help commit her to Millbrook Care Center, where she remained to this day. Cade pushed the thought away. Coincidence. It had to be coincidence.

"I apologize, Senator, but we're going to have to end this here." His voice carried the same authoritative tone that had won him three broadcast journalism awards and got him banned from two religious conferences. "Breaking news from Iceland demands our immediate attention."

In the harsh light of the early morning studio, Cade pulled up multiple feeds on his tablet, cross-referencing sources with the methodical precision he'd developed during his years as an investigative reporter. The pre-dawn hour suited him; it always had, ever since those sleepless nights in upstate New York, when staying awake had been safer than sleeping through his mother's religious episodes.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we're receiving reports of an unprecedented geological event in Iceland, accompanied by what witnesses are describing as..." He paused, something he hadn't done on air since that disastrous first interview years ago. The studio lights flickered, and in that brief moment between light and dark, Cade felt an old, familiar tension creep up his spine.

The early morning darkness outside the studio windows suddenly felt heavier, more significant. It reminded him of other dawns, other darknesses—the kind his mother used to say were filled with divine messages, the ones she'd make him pray through until sunrise. He'd spent decades building armor against those memories, turning that trauma into the driving force behind his journalism.

But what he saw on his feeds couldn't be explained away by his usual skepticism. The formations writing themselves across the Iceland sky seemed to bypass all his carefully constructed defenses, speaking to something deeper than reason or cynicism.

"We're going to show you live footage from Reykjavik," he managed, his voice lacking its usual edge of disbelief. "I want to be clear that what you're about to see has been verified by multiple sources, though I admit I'm having trouble believing it myself."

As the static-filled feed switched, Cade found himself doing something that would have horrified his younger self: he fell silent. The symbols dancing above Iceland were too familiar—they echoed the ones his mother used to draw on their kitKim walls during her pre-dawn prayers, the ones she claimed were messages from God. He'd spent his career exposing false prophets and religious charlatans, building a reputation as the voice of ruthless rationality in an increasingly irrational world.

His eyes locked onto a particular formation in the aurora—the unmistakable shape of  a tree with vast branches and an intricate root structure. His mother had drawn that same image repeatedly, she'd called it "the connection between worlds" and insisted it appeared in her visions regularly.

But now, watching the impossible unfold in the growing light of a New York dawn, Cade felt his carefully constructed worldview begin to crack.

"Daniel?" His producer's voice crackled in his earpiece. "Commentary?"

Cade gripped the edge of his desk, his knuckles white. For the first time since he'd clawed his way out of that oppressive small town and into the spotlight of national journalism, Daniel Cade; the man who'd made his name by always asking the hard questions—found himself afraid of the answers.

"What we're seeing," Cade finally managed, his professional instincts kicking in despite the chaos in his mind, "appears to be more than just a volcanic eruption. Our science desk is reporting unprecedented electromagnetic activity in the region, along with..." He paused again, scanning the incoming data. "Along with what multiple witnesses are describing as organized formations in the aurora borealis."

The control room had pulled together a split screen: one side showing the live feed from Iceland, the other keeping Cade in frame. He could see himself in the monitor—noted the tension in his jaw, the slight furrow in his brow that his viewers would recognize as his 'something isn't adding up' look. But this was different from his usual skepticism. This was something deeper, more primal.

"We're going to bring in Dr. Rebecca Kim from MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences." Cade touched his earpiece, grounding himself in the familiar routine of interviews. "Dr. Kim, are you with us?"

As the scientist began her explanation, Cade found his mind splitting in two directions. The professional journalist in him was already cataloging inconsistencies, noting the places where the scientific explanation fell short. But another part of him, the part he usually kept locked away, was remembering something else—a night when he was twelve, watching his mother draw symbols on his bedroom wall that looked disturbingly like what was now appearing in the Iceland sky.

"Dr. Kim," he interrupted, his voice sharper than intended, "you're saying these formations could be explained by unusual mineral compositions in the magma, but what about the reports of repeated sequences? The geometric shapes that multiple witnesses claim are forming and reforming in consistent patterns?"

The scientist's hesitation told him everything he needed to know. He switched tactics.

"We're receiving reports from religious observers claiming to recognize specific symbols in these formations. Would you care to comment on that?"

"Mr. Cade," Dr. Kim started, "from a scientific standpoint..."

The studio lights flickered again, and this time the feed from Iceland showed something new—a perfect cross hanging in the sky for exactly twelve seconds before dissolving into geometric swirls. The cross transformed into the World Tree image again, its branches reaching upward while its roots extended downward, creating a perfect axis that seemed to connect heaven and earth.

Cade heard the sharp intake of breath from his producer through his earpiece.

"I apologize, Dr. Kim, but we need to cut to our correspondent in Reykjavik." Cade's fingers drummed against his desk—a nervous tell he thought he'd eliminated years ago. "John, are you there? What are you seeing on the ground?"

As his correspondent began describing the scene, Cade pulled out his phone, doing something he hadn't done in fifteen years—searching for his mother's number. The formation in the sky had matched one of her drawings exactly, down to the way it dissolved at the edges.

But before he could finish scrolling through his contacts, his producer's voice cut in: "Daniel, we're getting reports of similar phenomena being spotted in other locations. We need you to stay with us."

Cade slipped his phone back into his pocket. Personal crises could wait. Right now, the story was demanding his attention, and whatever was happening in Iceland—whatever it meant for his carefully constructed worldview—he had a job to do.

Even if that job was making him question everything he thought he knew.

"We're getting confirmations of similar atmospheric disturbances being reported in northern Scotland and eastern Greenland," Cade announced, scanning the flood of information crossing his tablet. His producer was feeding him updates faster than he could process them, but years of experience helped him filter signal from noise. "We're working to verify these reports and..."

His earpiece crackled with static. For a moment, he heard what sounded like singing—not in any language he recognized, but somehow familiar, like a half-remembered dream. The sound made his skin crawl. He pulled the earpiece out, examining it.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we appear to be experiencing some technical difficulties." His voice remained steady even as he noted similar reports flooding in from other networks. Electronic interference, widespread communication disruptions, equipment failures following specific patterns. The journalist in him started connecting dots. "While we work to restore our full capabilities, let me summarize what we know."

But what did they know? Cade stared at his notes, at the growing list of impossibilities. Each rational explanation crumbled beneath the weight of evidence Cade couldn't deny. The journalistic objectivity he'd cultivated for decades wavered as memories invaded—his mother's hand on his cheek as she tried to explain what she was seeing, his teenage voice sharp with embarrassment and fear as he told the doctors she wasn't making sense anymore, the look in her eyes as orderlies led her away to Millbrook.

If she had been right all along, what did that make him? Not just wrong, but complicit in silencing one of the first people to perceive a truth humanity was only now confronting.

Outside the studio windows, the Manhattan sunrise seemed wrong somehow, as if the light was bending in impossible ways though it remained seemingly normal. The reflection of sky in glass somehow reminded him of what was happening over Iceland. And underneath it all, growing louder by the moment, was the absolute certainty that something fundamental was shifting in the world.

Cade took a deep breath and looked directly into the camera, doing what he did best—asking questions. Even if he was no longer sure he wanted to hear the answers.

"For those just joining us," Cade began, forcing his voice back into its familiar authoritative rhythm, "we're tracking what appears to be a spreading phenomenon that began with an eruption in Iceland approximately forty minutes ago." He glanced at his tablet, then back at the camera. "We have reports now from multiple..."

The studio lights flickered again, and this time the backup generators kicked in with a low hum. In his earpiece, his producer was arguing with someone about electromagnetic interference affecting their satellite feeds.

"I'm being told that we're experiencing similar technical difficulties across multiple networks," Cade continued, falling back on years of experience covering crisis situations. "We're working to maintain our broadcast capability and..."

A burst of static filled his earpiece, prompting him to swiftly remove it. Across the studio, Cade observed the director making a cut gesture, signaling him to switch to an external feed.

"We're going to try to reconnect with our correspondent in Reykjavik," he said, his voice tight with controlled tension. "In the meantime, let me review the sequence of events that..."

The studio fell into complete darkness, the generators failing. In the silence that followed, Cade heard it again—that impossible singing, closer now, almost comprehensible. For a moment, just a moment, he was twelve years old again, locked in that closet while his mother's prayers echoed through the house.

Then the lights snapped back on, and Cade found himself staring into a camera that was no longer receiving power, in a studio filled with dead equipment, while outside the windows, the Manhattan sky began to ripple with familiar formations.

"Well," he said to no one in particular, "I guess we're about to find out if mother was right after all."

As dawn broke over New York, Cade stood at his office window, watching the first hints of unusual light formations forming in the sky above Manhattan. His producer was already calling emergency meetings, but Cade barely heard the phone ring. All he could think about was a box of his mother's drawings, stored in his building’s basement storage locker, unopened for fifteen years. Drawings that matched, with impossible precision, what was now appearing in skies worldwide.
________________________________________

A slant of morning light cut through Sera's flat windows, illuminating suspended dust particles that danced around her like microscopic galaxies. Most of the surrounding flats remained quiet at this hour. Just how she preferred it.
Sera Blake studied the pages of her fourth manuscript, red pen hovering over paragraphs detailing the connection between ancient Norse runes and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Three empty teacups formed a semicircle around her laptop, testament to the night's work that had stretched into morning. Her small London flat had transformed into a fortress of knowledge—books stacked on every surface, printouts of ancient texts taped to walls, and hand-drawn connection maps spanning millennia of human history.

The muted television in the corner suddenly flashed with breaking news. Sera reached for the remote, unmuting just as footage of Iceland appeared. The glowing geometric formations above the eruption site made her breath catch.

"These unprecedented atmospheric anomalies continue to baffle scientists," the reporter announced as the camera panned across swirling patterns that seemed to organize with mathematical precision.

Sera leaned forward, heart pounding. The configurations matched—perfectly matched—the diagrams covering her walls. Patterns she'd spent years tracing through obscure texts and dismissed archaeological reports. Patterns her three published books had tentatively connected to moments of historical transformation.

Patterns that had earned her the quiet derision of mainstream academia.

She scrambled for her phone, dialing with trembling fingers.

"Malcolm? Are you seeing this?" she asked the moment her mentor answered.

"If you're calling about Iceland, yes." Dr. Malcolm Halloran's voice sounded strained, even through the phone's tiny speaker. "Half my department is demanding explanations."

"It's exactly as I described in my last manuscript," Sera said, pacing the narrow path between bookshelves. "The same geometric progressions I traced through Norse texts and Sumerian tablets. The same patterns that appeared before the six previous geological events I documented."

A heavy silence followed. When Malcolm spoke again, his academic caution was evident. "Sera, we've discussed this. Correlation doesn't..."

"Causation. Yes, I know," she finished, stopping to stare at the television where the Iceland formations continued their impossible dance. "But these aren't random connections. The same symbols appearing at seven different sites throughout history, each preceding a major geological event. The statistical impossibility alone..."

"Henderson from Oxford Press called this morning," Malcolm interrupted. "He's reconsidering your manuscript submission."

"Really?" Sera couldn't keep the surprise from her voice. Her previous two books had sold modestly in spiritual bookshops, but her third—the one that made explicit connections between ancient symbols and contemporary geological events—had been rejected by six publishers.

"Don't get too excited," Malcolm cautioned. "He's still calling your methodology 'speculative at best' and your conclusions 'mystical geography rather than substantive research.'"

Sera winced. Her academic credentials—a PhD in comparative mythology and three years of field research across four continents—seemed to carry less weight with each publication that strayed further from conventional archaeology.

"They've marginalized better researchers than us," Malcolm added gently. "Just... perhaps consider toning down the theoretical framework in your revisions. Focus on the symbol analysis without drawing such direct connections to geological phenomena."

​

Sera's gaze drifted to the framed photograph on her desk—herself at twenty-two, standing proudly beside her father at an excavation site in Turkey. His weathered face beamed with the joy of discovery. Three months later, he was gone, taking his controversial theories to the grave.

"I can't do that," she said quietly. "I've spent years tracing these symbols across five ancient cultures. They all describe the same phenomenon—guardians of something hidden beneath the earth. And now Iceland shows identical patterns. This validates everything my father and I have been saying."

"Sera." Malcolm's voice hardened. "You're risking what credibility you have left. Your father's reputation barely survived his... unconventional theories."

"His reputation or yours?" The words escaped before she could stop them.

Silence hung heavy between them.

"I'm sorry," she said. "That wasn't fair."

"No," Malcolm conceded, "but perhaps not entirely untrue either." He paused. "Just remember you're scheduled for the Pearson lecture next week. The academic board will be watching. Don't give them reason to question your commitment to serious scholarship."

After hanging up, Sera turned to the weathered journal beside her keyboard—her father's final field notes. The margins were filled with his hurried sketches of the same symbols now appearing over Iceland. Beneath one particularly detailed drawing, he'd written: They're not warnings. They're keys.

She traced the faded ink with her fingertip, remembering his voice. "What were you trying to unlock, Dad?"

Her computer chimed with an incoming email alert. The subject line made her breath catch: Seismic Anomaly Detected – Iceland Follow-up (CONFIDENTIAL).

The message came from an old colleague at the geological survey office, someone who'd taken her theories more seriously than most. The attachment contained ground-penetrating radar images from the eruption site. Sera enlarged the scan, heart pounding as she spotted a perfect geometric shape beneath the volcanic debris—an impossible structure where no structure should exist.

She printed the image, adding it to her wall of evidence. The weight of vindication pressed against her chest. After years of dismissal and academic ridicule, the proof was literally written in the sky.

Sera moved to the kitchen, brewing fresh tea while watching the continuing Iceland coverage. The reporter had been joined by a panel of experts, each offering increasingly complex explanations for the atmospheric phenomena. None came close to the truth she'd been documenting for years.

As she waited for the kettle to boil, Sera couldn't shake the feeling that everything was about to change. For the first time in years, the familiar weight of isolation lifted slightly from her shoulders. The patterns were finally visible to everyone, not just to her.

And somehow, she already knew nothing would be the same after today.