It had been fifteen years since the sun had last risen and in the halls of the dead, the corpses had mounted - too numerous to count. The halls of the dead began in every city across the world a few weeks after the Long Dark began and these halls had grown until cities were over-run. In every town and every village on every continent, the last man alive breathed his last. It was impossible to tell who the last human had been: there was no one to applaud this feat, take a note, record the event in history. History had died along with civilisation and the centuries of careful keeping of tales lay in tatters. Nature had taken a deep breath and held it. In the silence, governments fell, tanks rusted, reactors melted and bridges fell into rushing waters. On nature’s exhale, humanity was blown away.

The Great Silence that followed the Long Dark was actually not silent at all. Humanity had rotted but its alarms and sirens blared and wailed for years until one by one, these too fell silent, intimidated into quiet by the depth of the darkness that swarmed the Earth, growing with each power failure until it had knit together into one woven shroud, so thick that only a wakening sun would be powerful enough to tear it apart.

The Long Dark was an indiscriminate leveller that killed every species on air, land and sea. For over a decade now, the Earth lacked the simple rhythm of a beating heart, the soft sighing sound of a breath. But that wasn’t to say it lacked life.

Life lay in the positioning of decomposed corpses, clutching each other as if they could hold on to that spark that kept them entwined in life: carry it with them into the beyond. Life lay in the accoutrements of life - the trinkets and jewellery, the dinner table set for a family of four, the acres and acres of papers and deeds, photos and letters that told their tales of love and loss and wonderful, ugly emotion, all left discarded for anyone to see. A billion lives lived and a trillion possibilities lay entangled in this detritus: the lives that could have been, the children that could have grown and made children of their own. A trillion trillion possibilities, lying in the dark, waiting for light to return.