I wasn't even born when the scientists & politicians announced to the people of Medway that a cataclysm was soon to arrive. The Asteroid, Damocles, 40 times the size of our world, was coming. It was 10 years before it arrived, 5 before the good news that it would bypass Medway (coincidentally, my birth year) the good news didn't last.
Two years before it's passing, it was realised that such a leviathans mere passage was enough to destabilise Medway's orbit. Anarchy, panic & chaos was the rule of the day, until a scientist, Professor Carla Metier, devised a solution. The Metier Machine. This machine would form a shield around the planet & light collected & supplemented by the population would ensure those still alive, stayed that way.
But luck just wasn't on our side.
It was the day before Damocles was due to pass, that the Metier Machine would activate. It was learned that day, through sabotage by cults of the apocalypse, crazed fools who had convinced themselves that it was divine will that we be condemned to a slow, freezing death, that the machine had half the energy that was aimed for. In the last desperate hours before Damocles carried us away in it's wake, the Machine was set up. One final twist of fates knife diminished hope further. The Metier Machine covered only a small portion of Medway's vast being. The place, far to the north, was fled to. My mother & I were amongst those fleeing with nothing but the bare essentials, food, water, we only allowed ourselves the luxury of a picture of father & the family dog Cookson, both killed in an Apocalypse Cult attack one year ago. We made it, the two of us and a handful of others who survived the journey, but many more would never reach it. The mighty leviathan passed by & swept Medway away. Everywhere else on the planet quickly became uninhabitable, frozen wastes, the dead littering the streets, their homes. 10 years from Asteroid Day, so little of us now live, but we make do.
In the Shadowlands of Medway, my home.
It was a month after my 15th birthday when the stranger arrived. Dishevelled & weary, he had a look of the hunted in his eyes. Mother said when we saw him on the horizon that he looked as if Death itself was nipping at his heels. She didn't know how right she was.