As Dal Harbeck awoke, he thought of all the possibilities of today, free from the constraints of yesterday, acting as peephole into tomorrow. Amazing as it may seem, this was not the route that this day would take, no, it would take a far different direction indeed.

     The black orbs had been there for a while now, but few noticed them in Dal’s small farming-village, and those who did just rubbed their eyes and walked on to their early-morning business. At 7:00 the sun was quite highly risen, and people rich enough to have a news-TV set were the first to notice them, as coverage was tending to these mysterious orbs. By 8:00 everyone in this small town of Avodale was in the bunker, having been alerted long before. They were back. After hundreds upon hundreds of years, earth’s long lost enemy was back! Then the fire came…