Prologue
Earth’s population, Americans, especially Americans, liked to believe they understood the universe around them, But the truth was that they knew nothing. They hardly knew of all the wonders on their planet of existence. And when it came to other planets in their solar system, they did not even know the beginning of the story.
They had names for each planet, but these names were wrong. They look at the planets from their limitless views and believe them to be lifeless. Taking the red planet for example. Mars, a planet named after the Roman God of War. Fourth from the Sun, the second-smallest planet in the system. But Mars was not the planet's true title. Barsoom. The name of the planet was not the only thing the people of Earth had gotten wrong. The planet was not lifeless, nor was it dead, there was air to breathe, but the planet was dying.
The cities of the planet were polarized, and some cities, in particular, had become predators to their planet.
But that isn't where the story starts.
The blonde woman walked through the busy streets of New York City. She could feel them watching her every move. The rich woman moved quickly, dodging between people as they headed in her opposite direction. Trying to lose the trail of the being following behind her, the woman had taken a stranger into an alleyway for cover. She wasn’t fond of kissing strangers, but if it kept her hidden it was a good enough task. Once her stalker passed she pushed the fellow off of her, smiled lightly, and then went on her way to the telegrapher.
The old man sat typing away on his typewriter behind the counter as she placed an urgent message in front of the fellow. Click, Click, Click. The old man kept his typing up as he spoke in a bored and monotonous tone. “ Ten words a minimum. That’s fifty cents unless you want special delivery. ” Not once did the man bother to look at her. A smirk grew on her lips as she slid the golden coin to the man. His eyes slowly traveled from the coin on the counter to the blue eyes of the blonde woman. It was not every day someone came in with money like that. The man took the coin in examining it. He looked at the women in wonder as he also took the message. “Special delivery it is.” He said. “Name of Sender?” He questioned.
“Carter.” The woman said, her southern Virginian accent slipping as she said her name. “Sharon Carter.”
The telegraph Sharon sent back to her home state of Richmond, Virginia where her niece Shannon was. The telegraph read “ Dear Non. See me at once. Sharon Carter. ” It was a simple message, but it was a very urgent one. She hoped Shannon would get the message, and come to see her as soon as possible.
When Shannon arrived by train in New York, the young blonde was greeted not by her aunt, but by her butler. The man spoke softly as he held an umbrella over his and the young lady’s head, protecting them from the rain. “ Miss Shannon, I am afraid I bring sad tidings. Ms. Carter has passed. ”
Shannon was taken to Sharon Carter’s estate in New York, by carriage. And that is where she met her Aunt’s lawyer. The death was shocking to anyone who heard of it. Ms. Carter was a model for health, and vigor, and had just dropped dead. It felt almost inexplicable. The butler showed the young woman to her aunt’s study, talking to her of her Aunt’s relatively short life. Mr. Coles spoke of the Digs and Adventure’s Sharon had gone on. How she never seemed to stop, as if she was looking for something in particular. “Hopefully God has allowed her to at least find peace in death. She is with her family now, after all these years.” He commented.
Shannon picked up a picture of her aunt that laid on a messy table, littered with maps, scramblings, and artifacts. The older woman had this haunted look in her eyes. “ Father and Aunt Peggy used to say that she never truly came back from the war. ” She commented, not looking away from the picture. “ Must have been hard when your neighbors did not share your beliefs. Must have been hard given the fact that she also was not supposed to be fighting in the first place. ” Her hand rested on the picture, an attempt to try to reach the person. “Lord knows people made her suffer enough for her opinions. Michael, my father, said that it was only her body that went west. That she could work as hard as she wanted to avoid the guilt of losing her family, that she could continue to throw herself into these situations to avoid what was going on, but her mind would remain disassembled from it.”
“Try as she might, there was no hiding that she was a soldier.” Mr. Coles commented with a smile, placing a reassuring hand on the young Carter’s shoulders.
“Aunt Peggy and Father would tell wonderful stories about her. And Aunt Sharon, when she came back to visit, she made me feel as if I was capable of anything. ” A gentle tear ran down her cheek as she turned her head back to the butler, her gaze no longer on the picture frame. “I would like to pay my respects to her.” The butler frowned at the young Carter before taking her outside the mausoleum.
The mausoleum was beautiful, but it felt like such a strange thing to be on the New York estate. It felt quite out of place. But the dark colors of the mausoleum’s stone felt very fitting for the dark mood.
“There is no way in.” He stated hands behind his back. “ You will not find a keyhole or anything of the sort. Your Aunt insisted there be no funeral, no embalming, nothing. She was a rather odd lass was she not? You do not quite acquire the level of wealth and stature like your dear Aunt did by being like the rest of society, now do you? ”
Shannon stood heartbroken as she looked at the cold building which would hold her Aunt for the rest of eternity. That was not fair to the rest of them, was it? For Sharon to not allow them to grieve her properly.
“Come, let’s go inside.”
Shannon turned her head back to the butler, if only for a moment, before turning back to look at the mausoleum. That just was not fair. She stepped towards the building placing her hands on the door of the intricate designs. This was as close as she was going to get to a goodbye. “Inter Mundos” was engraved in large letters, in Latin which meant, between worlds. Shannon took that as if it meant how the dead were both on Earth and in Heaven. She did not think her Aunt, despite her Richmond and southern origins, to be very Christianly. Shannon placed her hand upon the stone of the mausoleum, closing her eyes she sent a quick prayer to her beloved late Aunt. Hoping that the woman was able to find peace and heaven after death. And with that goodbye, Shannon decided to go back inside and finally deal with the reading of her Aunt’s Will with the lawyer.
“ And lastly, I hereby direct that my estate shall be held in trust for 25 years, and the income to benefit my beloved Niece Shannon Ray Carter along with my staff. At the end of the 25-year term, the principle of the estate will revert to her in full.” The man read out to the young lady, before folding up the document as she sat at one of Sharon’s desks.
The young blonde girl just blinked at the man. She didn’t quite know how to process this. “I’ve always adored Sharon, but it’s been so long since I have seen her in person, I haven’t seen her since I was still a child, before her husband and her…” Shannon shook her head knowing that mentioning their deaths had always been a touchy subject, even now. “I do not understand why she would pick me.”
The lawyer shook his head as he grabbed a journal out for the girl placing it in front of her on the desk. “Sharon never offered me an explanation, even when I asked her for one.” The lawyer patted the journal. “This was a private journal of your aunt’s. She was very stubborn when it came to this. She was very explicit with the fact that you were the only one to be trusted to read the contents of it. Maybe this will give you the answers you seek.” The man said with a shrug of his shoulders he stood up from where he sat across from her. “I’ll leave you now, Miss Carter. My condolences.” He shook her hand, before making his exit, closing the door behind him to leave Shannon alone with the journal.
As the door closed, Shannon fell back in her seat no longer sitting up straight in the presence of others. This was so much for her to process and take in. She looked at the latched journal, and picked it up in her hands, unlatching the book and turning to the first page of her ex aunts writings.
“My Dear Shannon,
I remember how I would sit with you on the grass and tell you great and wild tales, which you always did me the great courtesy of believing. How we would fight dragons and knights in the backyard. This was before I was married, and before the war. Before the destruction. We were both still so young then.
Now, you are grown, a woman, you have been for some good few years now. Time and space have parted us more than you know. Yet I still reach out across that distance to the same wide-eyed girl who enjoyed our stories and our adventures and ask her to believe me once more as I speak of a wild tale that is more unbelievable than any of the stories we would share in your childhood. This wild tale truly dates back to decisions that were made long ago. But the action for us starts ten years ago in 1868 when I was not much older than you are now. When I resided in the Arizona territories, not too far from the backside of hell.
… ”