The Collapse CLI: Smoldering Stalks

 30 July 20XX +1

My Dear Lucilius:

Pompeia Paulina sleeps away behind me in the other room.

I write this in the darkness of night, by the light of the almost full moon, awake from a dream as I have been for the past three nights.

Each night it is the same: We are in the field of wheat where we met Epicurus and Themista. It is later in the year; the wheat is brown and dry and bowing down slightly in readiness. The winds of September, bearing on them the hint of Winter that will come in less than a month, whirl fleeting ripples into the ocean of grain.

Pompeia Paulina is there. So is Young Xerxes and Statiera. We are sitting on the rise of the hill, a picnic of fruit and cheese and wine on a blanket.

Then- soundlessly - the field suddenly erupts into flame.

It is not as the movies of wildfires that I have seen, an advancing wall of flame driving all before it. It is a singular eruption into a fireball without an explosion. I smell the scent of scorched hair; my own, I see by the withered hairs on my arms and the ashen eyebrows drifting into my eyes.

They are all gone – Pompeia Paulina, Young Xerxes, Statiera. It is just I and the picnic blanket, undisturbed by the fire.

One of the wine glasses pings and shatters. From nowhere, everywhere – gunfire erupts.

I fall to the ground, wildly looking for a weapon. There is no weapon of any kind, except the cheese knife that sits idly on the plate of cheese, now stained with red wine from the shattered glass.

A hand shakes my shoulder – startled, I turn and look. It is Blazer Man out of nowhere, handing me a rifle. He smiles bleakly at me, then takes aim at unseen enemies who cannot be seen on the road or in the smoldering field of wheat that is now naught but black stalks and seared grain heads.

With that, I awake. Every night, the same dream, at the same moment.

I am no soothsayer to see the meaning of this. The things are real, the facts are not: Pompeia and Paulina have never been to the field of wheat, it is not September, and Blazer Man has handed me no rifle – or anything else for that matter, fields do not spontaneous erupt into flame, and weapons are only shot by people using them.

It troubles me, Lucilius, more than I care to admit. There is no horror in the dream, just confusion and fear and a lack of understanding as my surroundings collapse into flame and death and last stands.

And yet sitting here I can still smell the smoldering stalks and see the drops of the dusky red wine staining the cheese beneath it.

Your Obedient Servant, Seneca