What if the world lost its fire?
It is a question philosophers used to ask in the comfort of their universities. They debated what would happen if the light simply stopped. Would it be a slow and fading? A gradual descent into twilight?
They were wrong.
It didn't fade away; it just ceased to exist.
Thirty years ago, the sky blinked. The Sun, the star of all life, the keeper of time, simply vanished. In the span of a single breath, noon became midnight. In the span of a week, the oceans turned to stone.
Now, the calendar is frozen at Year Zero.
Here, deep beneath the crust, Humanity learn to survive. In the Thermal Craters, millions huddle around the dying warmth of the planet's core.
There, upon the surface, the wind reigns supreme.
The skyscrapers of the Old World still stand, but they are no longer buildings; they are hollow skeletons enclosed in miles of sapphire ice. The silence is absolute, broken only by the shifting of glaciers and the shrieks of things that should not exist.
There, the snow does not melt. It accumulates, layer upon layer, burying history under a blanket of white oblivion.
There, the stars have grown fat and cruel. Without the sun to outshine them, they hang low in the firmament, watching the frozen earth with unblinking eyes, waiting for the last of the internal fires to go out.
This is no longer a world of days and nights.
It is a world of the Living and the Frozen.
And the cold is winning.