Chapter 1: Prologue

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This had once been a lake, nearly a sea’s worth of clean blue water where people would go boating and fishing during happier times. People had once called this cabin country, the type of place which people would leave the nearby cities and come visit when they wanted to get away from the hustle and bustle and enjoy something a little more relaxing for once.

Though never far enough away that they totally left the comforts of the modern world behind. This landscape once had telecoms; it once had running water, roads, restaurants, hair stylists, and much more.

But time had marched on.

It was probably close to ten thousand years ago when the sun had started to expand, growing within the sky until it became the entire sky itself. In such a short timeframe, it had pushed well into its red giant phase.

Within a few short years, cabin country stopped being paradise.

First the fish had all boiled in the water, then the birds stopped coming to visit. Soon, the trees began to die and with them came the harsh fires that had destroyed all of those modern amenities that people had come to enjoy. The roads then cracked and buckled under the heat, leaving nothing behind but rubble and ruins.

Within a thousand years, the waters were gone, leaving nothing but a barren lakebed. And with the waters gone, no human set foot within these parts again. Not that many humans were left by that point.

All that was left was the blackened husks of once mighty trees, the dried and cracked dirt of once fertile fields, the rocky bottom of a truly mighty body of water. In a few fleeting centuries, paradise had been turned into wasteland. In four hundred short years, it was all over, with nothing but a desert lingering behind as a reminder.

It was a story told on a global scale, as every little paradise was turned hostile, every ounce of life extinguished. Billions of humans turned to small collectives of thousands to desperate bunker dwellers numbering in the dozens to well… nothing, the flame of progress finally extinguished as the last of the radios went silent more than eight thousand years ago.

Though time was not done with its ravages quite yet, the endless march not interested in letting up even as its victims lay dead.

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The sun continued to grow, robbing the moon from our planet, tearing it away under the strain of relentless gravity. Not that such a body had many uses left as the last of the oceans turned to steam, the very depths of the trenches having become nothing but vapour, ensuring that there were no more tides left for our closest neighbour to regulate.

And soon night itself was removed as the sun was so large that its lights were now unavoidable. Night was more like twilight than true darkness anymore.

This was how things were ten thousand years later, that ball in the sky still growing, still broiling, and still baking the planet that was unfortunately located third in this forsaken solar system. Not that any other position would be safe nowadays.

This landscape had been left untouched for over eight thousand years, almost as long as humanity’s brief civilization had flourished upon this planet. Eight thousand years was the time between Jericho’s first walls and the rockets that landed upon the moon. It seemed like such a long time but in terms of the cosmos it was but a blip, the snap of godly fingers, the blink of an immortal’s eye.

Eight thousand years was a hundred human lifetimes without so much as a footprint, the flap of some wings, hell even the feeble wiggling of a single cell organism upon this truly dead terrain.

And after eight thousand years, the calm was finally disturbed as a boot pressed down upon the dried loam.

A figure walked ahead, placing one foot before the other as they traversed a world that wanted them gone, a world that had tried to kill them repeatedly over those eight thousand long years. A world that had inflicted brimstone and fire, spewing doomsday on the regular.

But in the end, what was something as mundane as the apocalypse to the likes of an immortal?

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