Currently slated to be a recurring subplot within the Haunted universe, The Civil War Arc starts the day Carey accidentally stumbles upon a large collection of Kodachrome slides in his friend EJ’s basement. EJ’s great-grandfather, Ilvars, was an avid photographer while a young man; moreover, he was one of the few people who brushed shoulders with Modris Valerins and Emils Pertinaks, the leaders of Ashland’s White Stripe resistance movement at the height of the civil war. While Ilvars’ professional portraits of Ashland’s war heroes are well-known, the slides Carey discovers show a very different side of the White Stripes movement—the candid photos showcasing the White Stripes laughing, relaxing, and partying about the campfire during what many consider to be Ashland’s darkest moment in history.

While Modris and Emils are easy to pick out, the identities of everyone else in the photos are lost to time. Using the slides as his guide, Carey will fall down the rabbit hole into a forgotten part of Ashland’s best-known story—the people he meets, and the truths he uncovers, eventually culminating in the heart-stopping answers for the questions about his own past.

Meet the Characters!

Once upon a time, The Civil War Arc was a story-world of its own: created in 2015, as a story called Faces In the Night. This story was intended to be my homage to the family history passed down to me from my Latvian relatives. Set in Riga during World War II, Faces in the Night revolved around the activities of a fictional rag-tag Latvian resistance group, committed to protecting everyday citizens from the secret police. It was later renamed Auseklis outright in 2017 (the Latvian auseklis having been a symbol of the resistance during World War II).

However, this being a time where my research skills were in their infancy, the extant drafts I have of Faces In the Night/Auseklis read like a bunch of American college guys feasting on pizza and beer with firearms in hand, running amok in a very poor excuse for the Latvian countryside. (Which, in a word, is exactly what it was.) By 2020, Auseklis all but disappeared from my creative conscious.

Upon the creation of Ashland in 2021, I returned to the ruins of Auseklis to see what I could salvage from it, to give the new fictional nation a history, language, and culture. From this came the rebranding of the “Auseklis” resistance group as the “White Stripes”, a successful resistance movement against the old Imperial Ashlandic regime. Since then, five of the major characters from the old Auseklis world have come roaring back to life–four as Ashland’s venerated “war heroes” of yesteryear, and the fifth as an unknown historical figure. 

As with the other story-worlds above, The Civil War Arc has much to owe to the Wayne Museum—in this case, a set of real-life Kodachrome slides which proved to be the launching-off point for this arc’s plotline. Additionally, this part of Haunted being told through a handful of photos call to mind that all of what we know of the past relies upon what survives into the present—the names and personalities of those who came before us, if not otherwise noted, lost to history. 

Meet the Characters!