What if the world lost its fire?
It is a question philosophers used to ask in the comfort of their sun-drenched universities. They debated what would happen if the light simply stopped. Would it be a slow, melancholic fading? A gradual descent into twilight?
They were wrong.
It was not a fade. It was a theft.
Thirty years ago, the sky blinked. The Sun—the architect 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 festers. In the Thermal Craters, millions huddle around the dying warmth of the planet's core. Cities have become vertical tombs of rust and steam, smelling of sulfur and unwashed bodies. Here, a man will trade his wedding ring for a canister of gas. Here, a mother will sell her memories for an hour of warmth.
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 encased 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.