Year 3283

Year 3283. She struck the sticks together and they came to life. They roared and sparked, their warmth licking her frozen hands. She shuddered as the fire lit up the space with a faint orange glow. Her belongings cast oddly-shaped shadows upon the floor and icy walls. Monsters of black, writhing and twisting like fat snakes just waiting to lunge. Wisps of wind glided in from the entrance and flicked stray hair in her face; each weak draft that slipped in felt like a new spray of water and she was already cold enough as it was. She didn’t want to risk being metaphorically “flooded”… so she’d built her cave facing away from the direction of the wind.
She stood up and shivered in her frayed clothing. Why were they frayed, you ask? Why, because animals were much rarer than ever! Sheep were scarce and cows were extinct, so it was only fair that wools and cottons were a dying fashion, too. In fact, Eli was oblivious to those creatures of the past. They were never a part of her life. The only animals that had become extinct in her lifetime were the chameleon and the sea turtle. A lot of animals had died before her and a lot more will die after her; it was only a matter of when. The idea of death didn’t really affect her, however: in this dead world, it was all she knew. Still, she continued to fight it.
The wind howled loudly and Eli felt the mountain tremble. The cold was terrible. The ice age was terrible. These gusting blizzards overcame her life just as they had overcome the bodies of many she loved. She’d lost so many in the ice. She remembered her fragile grandmother Evane, crushed beneath the rubble of a fallen snowbank. Evane, retelling a story as her dying words of how she had felt the distant explosion during the War of the Ages: the war that had killed her family and a countless amount of others. It was a fight between those huge countries that used to exist; countries like Russia and – what was the other one again? – oh, yeah! China!
But they were lost cultures, now forever gone in the crater: the remnants of that one bomb.
Eli crawled to the entrance and stared out into the whiteness and the fog that kept her within. The gusts of wind tried to knock her about ruthlessly but she managed to stay standing. Her thoughts were lost amongst that misty barrier just beyond her cave. It was like a dream, but it was more a nightmare. She was cold. She was so, so cold. She vigorously rubbed her hands together and then her upper arms to make heat. She would freeze to death if she stayed out here for much longer. Slowly, sadly, she huddled back into her cave; back into the safety of the fire; back into the loneliness – the emptiness – in a world of ice and nothing more.

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