Eternal Dusk Series · Companion Journal
If I Don't
Make It…
Notes from the edge of a world that didn't survive.
Before the roads went silent and the cities went dark, Rowan Simon
was a waitress in a small town who hadn't yet decided what she wanted from her life.
Then she didn't get to decide anymore.
This is what she wrote down. In the margins. Between the fear.
In case no one made it out to tell the story herself.
Ember was here! ♡
She wrote so someone would know.
If I Don't Make It… is a companion piece to the Eternal Dusk novel series — an in-world journal written in the hand of Rowan Simon, the reluctant survivor at the heart of New Moon Rising. These pages exist between the chapters. The things she couldn't say out loud. The things she needed to put somewhere.
The world ended badly and without warning. The journal didn't. Rowan kept writing — about what she ate, what she lost, who she was afraid she was becoming, and who she was certain she loved. Ember's annotations appear in the margins, in a different color, always without permission.
I keep a list of everyone's names on the inside cover. Not because I'm afraid I'll forget them. Because I'm afraid someone will, someday, and it shouldn't be me.
— R.S., Day 47This is not a survival guide. Rowan would be the first to tell you she's barely surviving herself. It's a record — of a group of people who found each other at the end of everything and decided, without quite meaning to, that it wasn't the end yet.
They didn't ask to be written about.
Rowan Simon
23. Red hair. Used to wait tables. Now she makes harder decisions than she ever thought she'd have to. Still hasn't called her brothers.
Ember Rae
Writes in other people's journals without asking. Laughs too loud for the apocalypse. The love of Rowan's life, in Rowan's own words.
Caleb
Never says much. Does more than anyone. His father was a preacher. He hasn't talked about that once.
Lexi
Sharpest person in any room. Keeps her grief somewhere no one's allowed to look. She'll be fine. She's always fine.
Mara
Stepped out of the rain with herbs and ash and two lost boys. Knows things. Doesn't explain them. That's probably for the best.
Ash
Watches the edges of things. First to see movement in the tree line, first to go quiet when something's wrong. He and Finn weren't brothers by blood. They were by everything else.
Finn
Gave everything away, every damn day. He didn't save it. He didn't waste it.
It went quiet faster than anyone expected.
No one named it. The people in Rowan's journal just call it the end of things, or the collapse, or sometimes — when they're tired enough to be honest — before. As in: that was before. As in: we don't talk about before much.
The roads don't get you where they used to. The radio still works in patches — mostly static, sometimes voices, once an emergency broadcast that just repeated the same eight words on a loop until someone turned it off. Buffalo is ahead of them. Albany may or may not be broadcasting something new.
The world of the Eternal Dusk series is recognizable — interstate numbers, gas stations, lavender oil, and skullcap tea — but something has come apart at the seams. Whatever came through wasn't silent, and it didn't leave cleanly. Some of what it left behind is still moving.
Read where it began.
If I Don't Make It… is the companion to New Moon Rising, Book One of the Eternal Dusk Series. Start with the novel — then come back here and read what Rowan couldn't say out loud.
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