Four o’clock on some idle Wednesday.
The world dipped into the sun. The world in question was Mercury. The tiny planet consisted of an inconsequential amount of iron when compared to the mass of the sun. It should have been just a blip and maybe a black spot on the sun. But the sun was on a precipice. An impending solar storm was poised and ready to release a fury like no man living or dead had ever seen. Mercury was just the tipping point.
The solar storm released lashed out tendrils of magnetically charged plasma which over ran the Earth’s Van Allen Belts. The feedback into the Earth’s magnetosphere caused fluctuations in the magnetic axis.
The ongoing solar storm fury continued on for over a thousand years. This is hardly the blink of an eye in cosmic terms but for those on Earth it created a whole new world in which survival was no longer easy. Nothing electrical worked due to the constant fluctuations of magnetosphere and the atmosphere was heavily charged making for fierce electrical storms. At night people could no longer see the stars. The skies at all parts of the world lit up at night with auroras bright enough that you could read by.
Another effect was that the sun was putting out less heat during the storm. This resulted in a global cooling. The immediate effect was super storms breaking out all over the globe due sudden differences in temperature. The long term effect was that the planet entered a new ice age in which polar tundra extended out much further. In the Americas glaciers started for form in the northern parts of the United States. These glaciers are still melting in After World.