A wide cinematic digital painting capturing a post-attack American concert venue at dusk. The stage is shattered, lights hanging at odd angles, smoke drifting across the ground. Abandoned folding chairs, scattered shoes, torn concert posters in Korean and English fluttering in the wind. No sirens. No police. No crowds. Just silence. In the foreground, a lone cell phone lights up in the mud, its screen glowing through dust and rain. In the far distance, faint silhouettes of armed men move with deliberate coordination—not chaos—setting up makeshift barricades and communication towers near a deserted airpark. The atmosphere feels eerily “switched off,” as if America itself has gone silent. Color palette: muted grays, cold blues, sickly amber light, and faint smoke haze.

The inciting incident in Beyond the Lost Horizon can happen

ByTC Marti

The frightening truth is that the inciting incident in Beyond the Lost Horizon isn’t as far-fetched as it looks. Not if these psychos have patience. 

Beyond the Lost Horizon isn’t something I concocted in my head after I woke up one day and quipped, “I think I’ll start writing a dystopian survival book that starts with a terrorist attack at a concert.” And no, the Oct. 7 attacks didn’t play into this, even if I started writing Beyond around the same time.

The image of a disgruntled libertarian firebrand crossing paths with a K-pop idol during a disaster was the real inspiration here, and that started in the subconscious mind. That alone told me I’d need to focus on a concert, and America and the developed world needed to fall simultaneously.

From there, I asked myself: How would I realistically explain a falling world in the year 2030? Easy. But I’m not telling you just yet. Instead, I’ll let you connect the dots with the clues listed below. As for the real answer? It’s in the trilogy, and I piece it together with surgical precision. Once you get to Book III, Beyond the Lost Fates, you’ll know the shocking truth.

What happens and what does Quinn Cozens see?

Beyond the Lost Horizon by TC MartiYou mean next to the relentless mass shooting that takes out nearly everyone the concert except for him and Yui Kikuchi?  Someone switched America ‘off’ during and after the attack. No police, military, or national guard troops. Just smoking guns and men shouting in foreign languages.

Days later, Quinn finds that they forged bases in the region with full patrols and coordinated communication, including the concert venue and a nearby airpark. They even ravaged the smallest towns in the U.S. in that cataclysmic moment, before congregating in what used to be dense population centers after the attacks.

None of it makes sense to the average joe or plain jane. But for Quinn, it meant one thing: These people lived in the States for a while. If they wiped out Anytown, USA, that’s all the information Quinn needed. And no government institution the masses trusted arrived to save anyone.

But how did these people get here? How did they interact before the attack? And how did they pinpoint when to attack? That’s the question Beyond the Lost Horizon, will start to answer. Like I said earlier, you won’t find the real answer until Book III, Beyond the Lost Fates. But if you want to build on the clues I handed you, then check out Book I in the trilogy and start connecting the dots.

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