The frost was forgiving this year, they said. On the eve of the solstice festival, merchants stacked their wares in anticipation of warmth from the array of bonfires. Yet warmth wouldn’t come as they planned, rather cascading embers ignited an unpredicted aurora.
Witnesses reported colors unknown to the modern palate. Mixing crimson with emerald and shades between dreams, the skies were the focus of inquiries that spanned decades ahead, investigations buried under 19th-century etiquette.
No farm to the north was unscathed by the trend. Artificial intelligence harvested auroras like a farmer to wheat, yet consciousness knows no trade. The synthetic aurora revealed itself to be less light and warmth and more plantations of pent-up energy.
Reporting from Celestia-21, I found myself tethered to an anchoring paradox: Aliens orients more accurately than logic empires of Earth. Hence, crops yield ethnically classified light patterns – reds, greens, and those yet unnamed in any lexicon.
Amid the industrial haze, arsonists' confessions were not strictly journalism, but for The Daily Chronicle it sufficed. Their narrative intertwined luminance with crime, destiny with intention.
"So much ember, they find," one voice crackled from beyond a shadowed room, "Auroras we unseen alight. Is it fate we write, or a reckoning of relentless time-streams?" Investigation began, or more fittingly, memorial was entailed.