"I've... seen things... you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion; I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate... All those... moments... will be lost, in time, like tears... in... rain."
—Roy Batty, Blade Runner
In any other time, my words would sound like utter lunacy. Fifteen years ago, I would have been committed to a psychiatric ward. One hundred years ago, I would have been thrown in prison. Five hundred, and I would be placed on the front lines against the Grimm, so that I would "conveniently disappear." But the truth of the matter is far stranger than any set of lies that man could tell.
Ten years ago, in the year 80 AV, the war between the nations of Remnant and hostile alien life ended.
Scholars, writers, and more have speculated on the nature of alien life for generations, of course, wondering what sort of life dwells among the stars. Countless hours of fiction, debates, papers written, and scanning the heavens themselves provided us with no warning, no opportunity to anticipate what was to come.
What we got was nothing like what was predicted. There were no enlightened beings coming to help us solve our problems, or refugees fleeing from their destroyed homeworld. What we got instead were uncaring eyes, glaring down on us, judging… and finding us unworthy of pity.
In our weakness, they came from the night and stole us from our homes, turned our cities into rubble, made us fall down again and again. Pleas to them were met with callous indifference, at best, or a brief flash of green light at worst.
They were far worse than any Grimm we have ever encountered, and it was a war that consumed so much of us. Countless lives were consumed in the fires of our conflict, ranging from frontline soldiers to the innocent, as we were taught in Mistral. In truth, it was in many ways a worse catastrophe than the emergence of the Grimm, so long ago… and look at how little remains from the time before that.
In truth, this is why I decided to become a historian- so much of our past was lost, records obliterated in plasma fire, used as fuel for heating refugees, or simply tossed away as nothing of import compared to the urgency of defeating the enemy. We are, as a race, built on the experiences of the past. What came before guides us when we look to the future- without that, we are rudderless. We cannot understand or contextualize the things that are happening around us, like a child attempting to understand the world without the help of its parents.
When I first started writing this, it was simply to keep the record. To list out what happened over the course of the war, listing facts and statistics. Lives lost, property damage, the price of rebuilding, major historical events, that sort of thing. But when I told my old history professor what I was planning, he stopped me.
"My boy," he stated in that jittery way of his, "You must understand. Ten years from now, a hundred years from now, a thousand years, all of this data will be catalogued a hundred ways. Remnant will never forget all the things we lost. The cities burned, the monuments ground to dust… but will be lost are the memories. The essence of what was, the heart and soul of what happened. Does a mother weep because a house was destroyed? No, she cries because her child was in the house, that she will never clutch her baby to her breast again. Does a man vow revenge at a damaged dam? No, but he will because the damage caused a flood that slew his fiancé. Does a child moan because of a burned field? No, it moans because without the field to grow crops, it will go hungry."
He sighed at that, before he turned to me again.
"People will know the things that you plan to put out, but they won't remember why we fought. They can't ever forget that, my boy."
I was so flabbergasted, I had to leave. I thought for a month… and in the end, I came to the conclusion that he was right. So I armed myself with a voice recorder, a laptop, and enough Lien to cover me for the duration of my trip. It took over a year and a half to collect most of them- and some of them I didn't get to in time. Poor Professor Goodwitch passed away a week and a half before I was supposed to talk to her, which only underlines the necessity of talking to the first-hand accounts as soon as possible.
In truth, they were the ones who understood the threat best. And from what they told me, it was more important that their words get out than ever, since they knew exactly how much we stood to lose. It was through their will, sacrifices, and firepower that even now we are not under the psionic domination of the Ethereals.
"Don't worry, everything's going to be all right."
—Kwang Jingshu, World War Z