For months, you have traveled through the sunless wastelands in search of hope. Forests and fields buried beneath the snow, cities frozen in ice, desolation shrouded in eternal night all around you. The only source of light remaining are the distant stars, and your trusty lantern, for which oil is running out fast.
Sleep means certain death. You must keep moving to stay warm, that is the only thing on your mind. You must find shelter. You must find the others... You know that there are still people out there. Pockets of civilization dotted around the globe. They must have found a way...
THE PAST
You still remember the day the sun faded away. It was in late august, around tea time... At first, its color shifted towards red, painting the sky with the colors of twilight, then begun dimming and shrinking at an alarming rate. The sight was spectacular... "An Eclipse?" "A Zeppelin?" "A black cloud engulfing the sky? It cannot be the sun..." Many questions, much speculation, but no answers.
Despite the great shock of the event, order was maintained. Trains were still running, albeit out of schedule, and the news were printed. Rumor was spread that the effect is temporary, that the sun would come back the next morning, that in Australia people can already see the first light of dawn... but the darkness persisted...
The great war was brought to a halt by rampant desertion at the fronts and mass protests at home, fueled by a belief that the massive bloodletting has extinguished god's hope in Man. Meanwhile scientists and engineers worked without sleep on a rational explanation, and a possible solution. Makeshift space programs were launched by desperate nations, hoping to re-ignite the sun with a delivery of top-grade coal. The french begun work on a giant cannon, the Americans on an elevator to space, the Russians flew balloons while the Japanese laid out plans for a ski ramp down Mt. Fuji from which to launch their shipments. Only the Germans managed to reach the stratosphere with a prototype rocket, but that was as far as we could get. The realm of the aether remained beyond mankind's reach...
Since it became clear that the sun will be gone for long, new plans were in the making, new inventions prototyped, new industries built to adapt to a world of eternal winter. With the power of coal and oil, the cities could be kept heated and lit, plants grown with artificial light, animals raised underground, new clothes and building materials designed to insulate and protect, new vehicles to traverse the snow, new drills to extract minerals, new medicines to cure frostbite... or so the newspaper said. Every men, woman and child were encouraged to work tirelessly on these projects, but morale was dwindling. Still, gears of industry were turning, building new types of sophisticated machinery and exporting them on rail.
Then, after the first year of darkness, things suddenly changed.
Despite the efforts to keep the public uninformed, the findings of a secret climate study were leaked out from government circles and broadcast through radio, causing widespread panic and the final collapse of society...
THE FUTURE
Time is running out.
The oceans have kept earth warm for longer then anyone hoped, and provided a reliable source of sustenance, but they now begun freezing at a rapid pace. Without their heat, scientists predicted that the atmosphere will soon condense, and the surface rendered forever uninhabitable.
It is mankind's final hour. Millions fled the anarchy of the cities for the countryside outposts, encouraged by wild stories of safe havens, of villages powered by artificial volcanoes, of underwater settlements deep below the ice built by the rich, and of spacecraft leaving from hidden launch sites for nearby stars...
You were a member of such an expedition.
You were a thousand when you left, now its just one...
Lost in the frozen wastelands...
But then...
In the distance, a faint light appears from behind the treeline. A glimmer of hope in the shape of an antique clock, its hands slowly rotating forward, unhindered by ice. Around the clock, clouds of steam rise from below. A mirage? Only one way to find out...
