Ceres is a world that is dying, hit by another planet as it passed through their solar system and with an orbit which spirals out away from their sun, just enough gravitational energy to keep it in orbit but not enough to hold it.
It has had other names before, names in thousands of different languages, stories about its creation and the destruction that would befall it told by billions, tales of gods and kings and the white nothingness before time.
Now it is only Ceres, a name put upon the world as it is put upon the only city left with a populace, though that populace is only one sleeping man and a construct of magic, the two of them waiting like the inhabitants of one of the tales told before the glacier had crept inch by inch over the sands, over the wetlands, through the forests and up the mountains and had met the already frozen peaks in a cold embrace so chilling and eternal that it left no vegetation alive and no life on the surface aside from that sustained by the magic stored within the planet itself, a dwindling supply which too would fade given hundreds of thousands of years.
Originally Ceres had been attached to one of these glaciers, carved out of the top of the mountain when the valleys of the land supported fishing and farming outside without need for protection unless in the depths of the winter. The man who is asleep dreams of those times sometimes, sustained by the magic coursing through him, the curse placed upon him and the planet beneath him. He would have lived a long life anyway, as those who had been born on this planet usually did, stretching perhaps into the thousands if he was particularly lucky, through the destruction of his own people he has pushed that further, three thousand years gone by so soon that he can remember only now, in his sleeping state, the warmth of the sun, what daylight looked like as opposed to the cycle of lighting he'd maintained around his city, that once people did not have to wear coats to be outside.
As the lands had become colder and everybody had moved up they'd cut away access from the land, scared of being overcrowded, and through hundreds of years of rituals and sacrifices had managed to suspend their city in the sky like a star if anything made of flesh had still been around to see it.
At the top of the city is a castle, as empty now as the rest of the city, great halls and corridors yawning open so that snow can collect in drifts deeper than the story of a house, enough to swallow battalions whole. Without maintenance the ice shifts, melting and refreezing so gradually that it would take a century or so for the carvings to be rendered unrecognisable.
Ceres exists as a representation of the monarchy it had sustained, spilling down from the castle into the houses of royalty, the schools and libraries for the rich and flats of ice for sports or sculpture depending on the whims of the king.
Below this was a marketplace of sorts where those from the lower classes who had strong enough magic and knew the right people could remake food, clothes and art into things which were warmer, more filling, more interesting for those up the road, in exchange for enough food for their families and the money to keep themselves warm.
Below them was the level of the factories and guard barracks from the days when they were attached to the ground, vast warehouses where those who lived on the lowest level worked to weave cloth, cultivate the crops that they could grow inside and supply the weapons for the people who policed them, surely important even when they had no threat of attack from the land and no transferring of citizenship.
On the very bottom layer, skirting the endless plummet to the frozen land and sea beneath them, where the very ground they stand on could disappear at any moment, was the area for the lowest workers, those who peopled the factories in return for food and diminishing supplies of fabrics and things to burn to stay warm enough that they'll live for another month.
They had been the first to disappear and the rest had followed until only the cursed man and his son had remained and then only the cursed man himself and the construct who watched over him.
Constructs are something not common but not unusual to this planet, naturally rising due to the large wells of magical energy embedded deep with its mantle wherever this energy manages to burst through. This form of life is sometimes short lived, made of whatever matter is closest and taking the form of things like a pile of rocks which moves itself, a tree which walks across the ground (when there were still trees to do so), flowers which bloom suddenly and vibrantly out of season.
The classification of these forms as construct had been a hot debate between scholars at the time, already more used to the more obvious constructs such as the deer made of living tree limbs who integrated with the flesh community for their five or six year lifespan or the birds made of ice who flew in the winter only to melt away with the reappearance of the sun.
Constructs filled the myth of these now buried lands, tales of figures walking the forests at night, beasts speaking in human tongues, children who didn't seem to understand anything their parents said, a woman as tall a cliff from the sea who resurrected every one thousand years at the bottom of a waterfall and then stood motionless, staring out at the sea.
At one point she had been the god who had created their planet, at another a protector, staring into the future so that she could guide them from harm, a tutor for the chosen one, the embodiment of nature itself and one thousand other things with each way the tale twisted between tongues.
The most common construct by far were those which dwelled among and were created by humans, non-sentient beings who helped carry, lift, guard and sort things, usually a simple form, the bare minimum for the task, woven from grass or made of sticks and clay.
There were always rumours of someone having broken the code, having finally created something which could think and speak and make decisions for itself, as any human could, and learn from the mistakes it makes.
These were all false, though some very complex and some very beautiful constructs were made for the purposes of pushing the craft and showing the skill of the mage who pieced them together.
They didn't last long.
None of them had the power that this last construct does, residing over the king's resting place in a form that she was not given but has adapted to. The power inside her, even greater than that in the planet as it dwindles away, keeps her strong, body almost flesh, mind growing as she talked and walked and remembered the things that she experienced. Even now she is the oldest construct to have ever existed here, more than one thousand years old. If there had been anyone alive who knew what she was there would have been trouble but instead she'd moved quietly, remaining where she had been stationed and looking after a body which is precious to her master, a different one now but in a situation almost the same.
The memories of this world, everything that has existed on it and within it, are locked within her too, drawn slowly from the magic of this world into her by the memories already inside her of another place and time, so different from any this world has had.
She knows that one day she will have to give this up but for now she remembers what it was like to look after her master and the feeling of sunlight through trees.
She wishes that this world hadn't faded away, as much as she can wish for anything.