FIELD GUIDE TO POST-COLLAPSE ATMOSPHERICS
Weather in this world is not just background. It is pressure. Almost an antagonist.
Climate did not collapse evenly. It fractured.
What began as anomaly became pattern. What felt like weather became jurisdiction. Across Montreal and beyond, the air no longer behaves as background. It concentrates. It isolates. It enforces. Weather becomes architecture. Microclimates become strategy.
Across the four books, climate has fractured into zones of instability. Each book inhabits its own atmospheric logic. Corridors of engineered wind between towers, stagnant heat pooled in stone basins, cold air trapped beneath highways and in abandoned quarries.
Microclimates form where systems break: urban canyons that trap humidity, underground tunnels that hold breathless chill, coastlines where black water alters the air itself.
OKA LOCALIZED WINDSTORMS
Wind corridors that appear without warning, strip shorelines, and vanish as if corrected.
Maps cannot predict them. Locals read the trees instead.
In some regions, motion itself becomes unstable. Gusts forming tight gyres that grind sand into glass and uproot anything not anchored.
RED ASH MOON
A sky thickened by suspended particulates, altering light, circadian rhythm, and migration.
The moon becomes a signal flare—an omen mistaken for astronomy.
Under ash conditions, sound carries farther. So do rumors.
Ash-heavy skies that dim noon into dusk and turn the full moon into a swollen, crimson eye, glaring through the veil of dust.
Zones where physics had
– Joel
stopped pretending to work.
WATER SHEETS
Precipitation that does not fall—it cuts like sheets of broken glass. Rain that behaves like fabric drawn over the terrain.
In these zones, flooding is not episodic. It is territorial. Water settles into memory, carving new gradients, turning basements into estuaries and streets into slow rivers.
Storms do not simply pass through; they reshape territory. Drought redraws borders. Floodwater remembers its path. Even silence has a temperature.
PATCHWORK SKIES
Thermal fractures divide the sky into adjacent climates.
Storm and stillness separated by a single street.
Forecasts fail because continuity fails. The atmosphere no longer agrees with itself.
QUICKSANDS
Soil destabilized by saturation cycles and sub-surface heat shifts.
Ground that negotiates your weight and sometimes refuses it.
Extraction infrastructure left voids. The land remembers them.
GLASTORM
Electrical storms intense enough to vitrify surface sand.
Lightning that rewrites terrain in seconds.
After impact, the ground cools into sharp memory—fields seeded with glass veins.
OOZING FORESTS
Fungal blooms accelerated by altered humidity basins.
Trees that host new ecologies along their bark.
These forests are not dead. They are metabolizing something else.
Survival depends not only on strength or belief, but on reading the air correctly:
knowing when to move, when to descend, and when the sky itself has turned against you.
THE NEWTONIAN PITS
Localized gravity wells caused by subsurface density collapse.
Movement slows. Objects drift off expected trajectories.
Physics does not fail entirely. It bends, slightly, and only here.
BLISTERING FORESTS
Heat pockets trapped by canopy geometry and stagnant airflow.
Air that scalds without flame.
Microclimates create borders invisible to satellites but obvious to skin.
THE ASH DUNES
Combustion residue layered by shifting wind bands.
Urban topography buried, then revealed, then buried again.
Ash does not simply settle. It migrates. It reorganizes districts. Entire neighborhoods drift beneath it, preserved in grayscale relief.
In this world, survival requires literacy. Not in prophecy, but in atmosphere.
To move safely is to understand gradients: of heat, pressure, moisture, charge.
Weather is no longer seasonal.
It is structural.
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Stéphane Roy is a lifelong reader and writer with a deep love for science fiction, apocalyptic worlds, and tightly constructed mysteries. This is his first novel. He lives in the Yukon with his dog and his aquarium, where long winters, silence, and wide, sometimes glowing, skies leave plenty of room for imagining the end of the world, and what might come after it. He is also waiting, with cautious optimism, for the aliens to finally reveal themselves and straighten us all out.