Looking up into the tiny black eye of his phone's camera, Matt Evans took a deep breath. It was a ragged one, hard-won after everything he'd been through. He prayed he had enough time left to send out this message. He had just a sliver of a connection, but it would be enough to get this video to the people who needed it. His friends, his family, and the world at large. Nothing that happened today was going to make sense without this message. The others had done their jobs, getting the damning information out there. He needed to add context to it.
Of course, Matt had no idea how he was going to do that. He had been churning words over and over in his mind for days now. But the plan came first. The words meant nothing if the plan failed. Now that he was almost certain the plan was a success, Matt wasn't sure that he could do this final part.
Another breath led to a coughing fit. It cost Matt precious minutes to clear his throat enough to speak. But it was now or never.
"My name is Matt Evans. You probably think of me as Ember. But for most of my life, I was called the Hammer. Today you saw me and my teammates do something unthinkable. Unheroic as you can imagine, even after what happened six months ago with the Silence.
"What we did is going to be one of those big moments in history. The kind that kids who aren't born yet will ask you about. The kind that you won't want to talk about but that's the burden of survivors of history. You have to talk about it. So when they ask where you were on that day, take a deep breath and tell the story of the day the heroes died.
"But that will be years from now. When your memories have been contaminated by years - maybe decades - of news stories, shared narratives, and wishful thinking. You will all have meaningful stories for those future kids. Because you will live the rest of your lives praying that bullshit stories and vague moral lessons will help this make sense. That if you survive enough years, somehow you can fool yourselves into thinking that it won't happen again. That you will be able to trust the Disk and its Priests again.
"You won't. You never will again. Not really. But you'll lie, to yourselves and each other. You'll lie to the children and the history books. And eventually, today will become a nasty bit of history. A fluke in the millenniums of rule by the benevolent Disk. Something scary that only happened that one time. A symptom of the corruption that went unchecked in an unfortunate oversight.
"Corruption that may have created a singular evil like the Necromancer, who stole an entire generation of Chosen's powers. Corruption that may have lead to the exploitation of some young men and women who had the unfortunate fate of being born one of the Transformed variety of Chosen. Singular incidents that were perpetuated by singular exceptions to the rules of the Priesthood.
"But that just isn't the truth. It wasn't that one time. In that one place. It happens far more than the Priests want us to think about. The corruption has become an illness that has infected every bit of the Priesthood.
"They are the true Villains, the kind that are absolutely evil. Not the pretend ones that the Disk randomly Marks with the Night-side brand to fight the Heroes. Real, fucking evil.
"The Necromancer terrified the entire world for this moment in time that felt like it lasted forever. It may have only been half a year. I can't remember anymore. The Necromancer was long forgotten by today. Today they anointed the first Hero who was Marked by the Disk after his reign of terror.
"The show must go on, right?
"One day, some of you will remember standing here in the rubble that had yet to be cleaned up and turned into the shiny memorial I'm sure the Priests will insist on. One that, eventually, everyone will barely remember why it was built or who was entombed within it. Those of you who do remember will gather and share your stories. Where you were when it happened.
"Today will be like what happened with the Necromancer when he unleashed the Silence, but bigger. I remember thinking to myself when the Silence happened that my story was going to be the worst one ever. The boring kind that no one retells.
"I believed that like everyone else, I would embellish it as I got older. I would make it sound like I cared. Like I was somehow affected by the news. But I have to admit, when I heard, I wasn't. It didn't matter to me. I still had work to do. The glorious job of unloading a truck of cheap junk into a convenience store. Get the invoice signed and move on to the next.
"I saw the announcement of what had happened on the TV in the back of the store, by where the old men lingered over cups of cheap coffee pretending to have a life. Every Hero in the world struck down within minutes. Their powers completely gone. Many hurt, several confirmed dead. Villains were affected too, but in a second wave, one that many of the news channels were able to air live.
"Many of the casualties of the Silence were from active battles, Villains mid-battle who had no idea that the person they were launching over-powered, idiotically named attacks at were stripped of everything that made them more than human.
"The Heroes in those situations didn't stand a chance.
"No one knew for days what exactly had happened. No one had any idea that the source of the tragedy wasn't the Disk itself. It was terrifying for the world. Many people wailed and tried to appease it. It wasn't until the true mastermind emerged from whatever hole he had crawled into to recover from his terrorist attack that we knew the truth. We saw the Necromancer for the first time, though that wasn't who he was yet. He didn't take up that name for some time after the Silence.
"He was one of us. Well, not a Villain like me. He was a Hero who'd gone off the deep end. Had been a darling of the scene for a couple years with a stupid name. Blue Bolt. I never went against him. I'd been burnt out for almost twenty years before he was even Marked. And after I was forced out, I didn't pay much attention to the spectacle of Heroes and Villains. It had damaged me enough already.
"But that dumb ass name the Priests had given him was gone and now he called himself the Necromancer. He was our new god, and the Disk did nothing about it.
"Not for weeks, anyway.
"I guess it was trying to see how this new order was going to play out. Or maybe whatever the Necromancer did to steal away the power of the super-humans had affected it too. Whatever the reason, this is the story of what the Disk did to set the world right.
"No. Fuck that politically correct bullshit.
"This is what WE did to set the world right."
Matt paused to catch what breath he could before he began the story of how the attack on the Disk and its Chosen a little over six months ago had set in motion the events that would destroy the nice, neat order of the world. Events that would change everything that everyone knew to be true. He told a story of Heroes who became Villains and Villains who became Heroes and the corrupt system that had nearly torn them all apart.