Everything became reversed.  A green-purple glow hung in the air over the city, shimmering in the sky like the sail of a ship.  The broken remains of the Biodome flashed and bent the light in total chaos.  People sat mesmerized on the roofs of buildings, gazing up at it, afraid to look down at the chaos in the streets below.  The automated flight-paths of the skimmers were distorted and deranged.  Drones and cars on autopilot crashed into buildings, sending flaming wreckage into the crowds below.  Lights were out all over the city.  There was looting and screaming as a howling wind blew cold across the bay and swept them all into a kind of timeless fury.  People were shaking violently and falling down in the street, plunging deep into trance states they would never remember for the rest of their lives.  Others were pushed out of their bodies, their astral doubles flung into the air to look down at themselves far below.  Many of the most devout Coconstructives simply went insane.  Convinced that the Hero was about to return, they took to the streets with weapons and fury.  The war had begun.  The military sent drones to the outer city to gas the civilians, but they were overtaxed programmed for surveillance, not warfare – so easy to shoot down that it became a game to bait them, waiting to the last minute to blow them out of the sky with small arms.

It was the soldiers who presented the real problem.  And Novosh’s elite Black Guard were the worst of the lot.  Many of the rank and file abandoned their posts, not wanting to shoot their own friends and family, but Novosh’s minions, when they were not utter cowards, went to the utter extreme and plunged through the screaming crowds with abandon, spreading carnage wherever they went as Novosh sat in his lair, watching the spectacle on a bank of 128 monitors and brooding over his next step.

And through it all, all of those who remained conscious were fascinated by the eerie presence they could all feel but not explain.  A  power that seemed to come from within and without at the same time, a kind of invisible glow, or curved air that centered in their minds but which removed all sense of boundaries against the outer world.

Cassie found herself wandering, her clothes ragged and torn, through the city streets just outside the Citadel.  She was weeping, convinced that all was lost when suddenly she saw or somehow sensed with her mind’s eye a presence standing before her.

“Cassie!,” came the familiar voice.  “You should have told me, Cassie.”

Something moved ahead of her and she raised her sunken eyes to see 3Pac standing before her, just as he had appeared the last time she’d seen him alive, except that he had changed his clothes.  He was now wearing a cloak of blue velvet.

Cassie glared and lunged at him, trying to kill him, “You son of a bitch, we all thought you were dead!  I was worried to death about you.”  She struck him on the chest several times, which he allowed because he was so much bigger than her.

“I thought … I thought I could do it differently.” he said.

I just figured out that for several years the peak season of my year has been from Wizard Con in August through Haloween.  That’s Leo through Scorpio.  The reason I figured this out was that this last weekend was a Scorpio moon and I had the most magical time ever.  I was noticing that Virgo is much more magical than I thought – Brian pointed out that my chart is actually very heavily “Virgo-influenced”, with Sun and Moon in the 6th house, which is ruled by Virgo.  And I’ve always loved Scorpio, and now I can see that the cycle of the year and the lunar cycles have the same peak for me.  And also I can see that Aquarius is “boring” because it’s at the opposite end of the Zodiac from my peak season.  Aquarius-Pisces-Aries  is the opposite of the season, but I have a large Pisces influence, and I’ve always gotten along well with Aries, so basically Aquarius is the one I have to skate by.

And Sagittarius is always a flaky time for me because it comes at the end of the Scorpio peak.  It’s pleasurable, but also “exhausted”, like cosmic afterglow.  I’m still working with this however because my Angel of Mars comes from Sagittarius, right next to Scorpio in Neptune.  So I have to think about how to recombine these signs so I’m not losing myself in Sagittarius and wasting all this energy.

Scorpio was intense, but very rushed and Sagittarius I just got almost nothing done, no writing.  But here comes good old Capricorn. 

Mercury Sextile Neptune really hit me hard.  Neptune aspects are very powerful for me.  This afternoon I started surfing social media and reading all about the new administration, and I had very intense feelings about how utterly stupid the United States is now and I vowed to go forth onto the web in a crusade for the American Dream.  It’s momentum building from all the writing I’m doing, but it definitely went beyond the intellectual and into the emotional realm for me.  Comparing to the Neptune-Venus aspects last week I’m pretty sure now that Neptune aspects are always going to be major for me.

I’ll be watching tomorrow for the only aspect during the day – Moon squaring Mars around 11:33, and then going void of course until it enters Capricorn at 4:43.  So basically I’m predicting a decent morning and followed by an afternoon of who knows what? 

I’m still working on this Mars-Sagittarius/Neptune-Scorpio alchemy.  I know this is a major key.  Now that I understand the Sagittarian “vagueness” as an aftermath of the Leo-Virgo-Scorpio swing, I have to learn to pick some kind of target. 

And furthermore, Mars is moving into Aries this week, followed by Venus one week later.  This is the time to pick my intention for the whole cycle (isn’t it?).  I’m really excited about this.  I’m really hoping to get a handle on some things watching this whole year go around.