The cold—it was all-encompassing. It blotted out the sky, stole the warmth from our embrace. The chill of winter never ceased. The seasons slowed to a crawl, until they were little more than cruel jokes. There were only the blizzards and the endless snowfall. Grasslands withered. Forests cracked and split. The tropics froze over, entombed in ice.
It was a harsh time.
Many perished.
Hundreds were lost to the snow in the first years. Only the strong, the desperate, the cruel, survived. It took a part of us we could never get back. The carefree life of abundant food and easy warmth was gone; every day became a battle. Every sunrise was another skirmish against death.
We had to think and plan for tomorrow, because tomorrow wanted us dead.
The lazy coming of summer never returned. Not for hundreds—no, thousands—of years.
With the waters frozen, even our tears froze. And so did our hearts.
The world hadn't just grown colder.
We had grown colder.
Instead of finding warmth in each other's arms, we found warmth in each other's spilled blood.
The fires of war roared brighter than ever. Constant fighting, tooth and claw, over the scraps left behind by a warmer, kinder age. When the scraps ran out, we fought for the flesh itself.
In our mouths were still the words of love and compassion—but it was a hollow thing. Torn away and replaced with sharp teeth, desperate hungers, and the meat of those we once called brother, sister, lover.
We devoured each other to keep the chill at bay.
It was mind-numbing.
It changed us.
Everyone wished for things to go back to how they once were. But they never did. Generations came and went. Millions died and were born only to die again, never seeing the sun, never touching green grass, never feeling a true summer breeze.
We all prayed for warmth, prayed for light.
But it fell on deaf ears.
Not even the gods could keep us warm. Only the fires of hell gave us comfort.
Dark spirits whispered in our ears during the long, endless nights. Maybe they were the ghosts of our ancestors. Maybe they were the deathless echoes of our own despair. They spoke of punishment. Of greed. Of how this frozen hell was a reckoning for all we had taken without giving back.
There was no future for us, they said. So we stopped living like there was.
We fought. We killed. We did everything we could to lash out at destiny.
We howled at the dead sun, begged it to return.
It never listened.
Eventually, even our rage burned out.
The guns fell silent.
The swords dropped from numb hands.
And all that remained of mighty empires, of vast kingdoms, of once-unstoppable armies, was silence.
They had not been defeated by each other.
They were defeated by the cold.
Starvation. Exposure. Despair.
We had built mountains of corpses, rivers of blood, walls of bone—and it had gained us nothing.
No one was left untouched. No one had won. Everyone lost everything.
Our world was over. And whatever came after... there would be no place for us.
The world had reset.
Back to zero.
There was a new normal now. A colder one. A harsher one. And it had no need for kings or conquerors.
For when the sun finally returned, it was not our sun.
And when the grass grew back, it was not our land.
It was theirs.
The ones who had survived the forever winter—not through strength, but through cunning, through patience, through sacrifice. They had been the meek, the broken, the prey. We had driven them into the dark. We thought them weak. We thought them finished.
But they endured.
And now, with the world thawing, they rise. They watch us with cold, bright eyes.
The cold had made them stronger.
And now we—once mighty, once invincible—are at their mercy.
And they are hungry for revenge.
We have only ourselves to blame. Our greed. Our arrogance.
It was never enough for us. And now, we have nothing left.
Not even tomorrow.
They have already stolen today from us, just as we once stole every day from them.
We used to think ourselves gods.
Now, we cower.
Here.
In the dark.
At the end... of the Forever Winter.