Chapter Text
It was a sunny, late August day out by the Pacific coast, a summer day that faded into cricket-calls and gentle clouds, when the world began to end.
Foxes climbed from their backyard pools, fur still soaked through and clinging to their bodies, and basked in the light; bears drank vibrant cocktails stronger than they smelled; deer touched their noses to their fawns as they tucked them into bed with gentle hooves. The fireflies cast on their lights and drifted slowly along, and all watched the sun sink lazily below the horizon and paint the sky with smudges of striking pink and orange, fading as the hour passed and the world grew dark.
It did not rise the next day.
The morning that hadn't come was thoroughly inexplicable, even back when the chances of explaining it were at their highest; when the power grid still mostly functioned, and meteorologists and astrophysicists and pastors and doomsayers all cast their stones into the ring, coming up with little beyond the trivial observation that it was dark and cold and getting colder. Those in later parts of the world had the stranger half of things, considering everything: they had seen the sun vanish from where it stood without warning or trace, and though the posts and alerts began when much of the other half was asleep, they did not cease once they awoke. The star-scattered black sky filled with clouds that masked the round, full moon and rained, rained, rained, until the rain froze and turned to snow, and still there was no explanation, and there was a panic all throughout the world, and the power grids began to fail. Lines collapsed from storms; others fell to predicted anarchy. All signals, eventually, fell silent, save those few lonely voices shouting out over the noise of radio static, fueled by frantic cranking and burning diesel.
Many died trying for power and heat, choked in their own homes by gas fumes and wood smoke. Others, their failures more violently apparent, burned to death in a frozen world, and the lucky few remaining, coming across the charred skeletons of their houses some time later, deemed it some joke by a god that, clearly, had grown tired of them. Some died of disease in hospitals whose backup generators eventually failed, or lost access to the medication keeping them alive. Some scrambled to find a warm place to stay and, when they found they could not, were buried in the snow.
At some point, the world stopped cooling, though it did not return to a comfortable temperature. Those most prepared carried remnants of their ancestry: thick, insulating fur, typically; they lived in cold places where the vanishing changed, in some respects, very little. Those near the equator dreamed of places farther north: places where the grids were built to survive the darkness. Places with power and the ability to communicate. They assumed that all the world was the same temperature now, but only a few remote locations were prepared for it (for, they wondered, why would most anyone most anywhere in the world even think to do so?). A few sent out frenzied radio signals to no response, first asking, then begging, then only howling and braying to nothing but silence. They had long since abandoned call signs. They prayed for saviors, and perhaps to some they did appear in time, and to others they appeared only once it was too late.
More pressing than the cold, and, as days turned to weeks (or seemed to, given the newfound futility of time), now more pressing than the mystery of what, exactly, had happened to the sun—what kept the moon shining yet the sky pitch-dark, what had cooled the world and cast down the snow—was the matter of food.
The animals they kept—those on four legs and not two, only a few degrees away from their keepers—they would live, at least for a little, and their carcasses would sustain the ranchers for a while as the plants they fed on crumbled. Those who ate only those plants: they were less lucky, at least at the beginning, when survival was considered over the scale of weeks and months. Some could live on meat; later, the horses would find themselves to have become an omnivorous people, their flat teeth belying all that would become of them, despite the sickness that resulted. Some ate that which could be dried and preserved: hay, canned goods, rice and beans. Still, their numbers dwindled. The luckiest few with lights to grow their plants and generators to power them were overrun with requests from the less fortunate, and often, what they had was taken by force. The scavengers shoved their pink noses through fields of white in search of carrion, and usually, despite all the death, found nothing at all.
Eventually, the shadows grew longer and moved with their own sort of life, and the moon still shone bright in the sky when the clouds didn't cover it and never moved from where it perched. Each frantic, frenzied snowfall buried more of the world below under sheets upon sheets of white, before eventually even that calmed and quieted and settled into its own gentle rhythm and then, finally, ceased.
Seff had been alone in a cabin of her own design when the sun had gone away. She had built the thing with her own hands. It was roughly shaped, as her hands were thick and clawed, but skillfully constructed; she had insulated it first against a mundane sort of cold, and next, after checking the faces of all her clocks to be sure they hadn't stopped the previous afternoon, she had taken her boards and her hammers and thickened the walls and checked the locks for something much harder to explain. The power had gone out at some point, so she built a fire, and in the light of the fire she stood.
She was a woman, standing on two strong legs. She was, as well, a wolf, looking out over the fire with eyes sharp and shining, her long, dark mouth contorted into a concerned half-grimace. She hovered, as she always had and alongside everyone else on her Earth, at the abstract point where the two ideas merged. Her hands, as mentioned, were heavy but nimble, gray-furred though threaded with white and black and brown and capped with dark clawlike nails. Her shoulders were broad and strong. Her body was large and well-muscled, under a thin sweater at first and then cloaked by a heavy winter coat. Her legs were similarly sturdy, rigid in her work jeans, and ended in a pair of dull brown boots. She had a head like a sharpened dog, straight vertical ears, and stark yellow eyes burdened with a sinking heaviness which could not solely be attributed to the weight of time. Her teeth sat in her mouth in hooked ordered rows and dug into her lower lip. Her tail fell loosely behind her.
She did not see a point in going out. Her car, already decades old and cheap and half-wrecked, had apparently frozen completely the one time she considered it. She doubted there would be much need for a carpenter for the time being, with food, it seemed, a greater priority than any other. Those who would simply freeze, she guessed, were already frozen.
And food, she realized, was her priority, too; she kept the fresh meat on emergency bags of ice in an insulated chest freezer out back as soon as the power had gone out, and rigged up a diesel generator. She counted her rations and old cans of food rather carefully, and when the permanence of the change had really set in she turned off the generator and focused on what she could. She had vegetables, too, though she could discard them if space grew thin. She clutched an ax close to her body and split wood for and watched for figures in the woods, though none emerged.
She had not been completely snowed in, despite how much had fallen. The snow did not melt, but it had compressed with time into thinner sheets and overall had not fallen in layers thicker than a few inches. She could still open the door, and she did once in a while, and cleared out a larger space outside and unburied what she could. Largely, though, she stayed inside. She had lived in the cabin for years, and knew the four walls well, and resigned herself to containment within them for the time, despite how foolish it felt. Routine found its way into her heart despite the surreality of it all. The ample trees before her dried in front of the old radiator when she ran the generator, and then she built from them more fires to dry logs, and slowly her stash of firewood grew until the forest around the cabin had thinned considerably and she no longer feared the cold. She brushed her teeth each night with baking soda and boiled ice. She slept for nine hours and stayed awake for fifteen, but rarely kept track.
She wondered how the world had stayed so warm, despite how cold it was. She did not own any working mechanism to measure temperature, but she had not felt it to be too much colder than the coldest winter nights. Sometimes she theorized that it was the same mechanism that kept the moon shining, despite it relying on sunlight to do so (she knew, at least, that rocks did not typically emit light), while other times she vaguely recalled some misapplied knowledge of geothermal dynamics and tried to remember if there were any obscure volcanoes around. Much of the time she was clueless, and fully aware of it, so she instead took to wondering if anyone else had figured it out, but that idea, too, set a deep pit in her stomach.
When she grew tired, she played old requiems for viola and solos meant to be heard with piano and occasionally some gentle harmonizing line with no one else to pick it up. Her thick hands pressed easily into the strings and shook them, and she hummed softly along as she played, now devoid of accompaniment with the absence of electricity. She rarely sang, and her voice was low and raspy and gentle. By hand, she wrote guides on furniture and cabins and hunting, on the acquisition of licenses that no longer mattered, perhaps to restore some sense that this all was temporary and that there would be use for her writings in time.
She cooked over the fire, though she knew she could eat her food raw. Her stomach was strong, but to risk becoming ill terrified her; she treated the water she collected from the snow outside (given the pipes had failed long before) with tablets she stashed in bulk, and organized what she had started to think of, in some recollection of millenia prior, as her territory. She fed on beef and lamb and venison, all charred though she hadn't before been an awful cook, and for the first few days she had eaten wilted vegetables to fill her stomach, too, before those ran out. None of it was quite enough, really; she was large and broad and muscular, a carnivore among carnivores, and to ration went against what her body frequently told her to do. The work kept her strong, but never as strong as she would have been in easier times, she was sure.
Her trust withered with the isolation as time ticked by, and what might have been days eventually turned to weeks and then months. She cut wood and lit fires, hour by hour, but even the canned food grew sparse. Her faith in the light's eventual return dwindled with her rations as she confronted the reality before her. She would have to leave. It would not be a matter of if, but of when. There would be food elsewhere, she was sure, if there were others alive. There would be livestock with stores of feed still left. She was certain of it. There would be, if nothing else, what had once been some illicit pot-growing operation now feeding an entire settlement.
The night Seff decided to leave was, by her best judgment and the marks she placed in a little brown logbook every time the mechanical clocks she watched with had struck twelve, about nine weeks past the vanishing. On that night the snow had long ceased and the sky was clear and thick with stars. She had checked her stores of food and found them to have, without her notice, become threateningly bare. The engine was frozen completely, and she did not know enough about cars to fix it, so she set out on foot, tucking herself into a heavy coat despite the thick fur that already covered her body.
She took with her, in a heavy backpack, whatever she thought others would barter for: money, of course, and jewelry, and firewood, and spare coats and blankets, and then a kerosene lantern (as she suspected her flashlight's batteries would drain completely in the cold), a matchbook, and a hunting knife. She set out in the direction of the dirt road leading out of the forest and followed what little of it was visible beneath the snow, all the while searching for footprints but only finding her own. Her best bet, she was sure, was the nearest commerce center. Those in the suburbs and lake houses would have congregated there, looking for food in the congregation of restaurants, or perhaps for functioning power. It wasn't too distant. Her home was not nearly as isolated as she liked to think it was.
When she reached the end of the dirt path, where the rusted fences and street signs appeared marking trail boundaries and private land, she had almost hoped to see cars speeding past on the asphalt before her, headlights gleaming off the snow. She raised her lantern in the hopes it would reveal anything else, but all the snow was free of tire tracks. Perhaps lighter paws than hers had stepped on it, as when she did a thin layer of ice broke free before her boot left a print. She hoped so; she was hardly willing to consider the possibility that she was alone.
A transmission tower by the road had fallen, blocking it off to the left. The power lines leading directly to her cabin were safely buried underground, but further out the older wires hung in the still air or lay motionless by the asphalt. She worried briefly that they would start a forest fire, but that worry slotted neatly far behind the others, more pressing and personal.
She watched the street ahead, feeling altogether like a stranger, and very young, and lonelier than she had been conscious of in the time preceding. As she walked, something in the emptiness stirred memories from decades prior, and she felt again like she had in winters twenty years prior.
As a child, she was not yet broad but she had been wiry. Her face had not yet set into hard angles and her paws remained thin, yet she moved with a heaviness belied by her form. She had watched the other girls on the schoolyard in her elementary years, doing flips, chasing one another; fox and squirrel and rabbit, lithe and gentle. She had taken herself to be a sort of scientist in this manner. It pleased her to christen herself an observer. Anything else was too frivolous. She should have been a scientist, she now thought, with the resignation of a woman older than twenty-eight, and then maybe she would have more of an idea of the state the world was in. She took it as wishful thinking.
The younger Seff, the observer and sociologist, had always focused on the girls her age. They fascinated her and filled her with some spite and some envy and something else like admiration she wouldn't place until she was far older. Boys held the same disdain, but theirs was often transparent. Girls were inscrutable. They twirled and cartwheeled about and mocked each other in high, sing-song voices. They split into cliques which subdivided and fractalled out as far as they possibly could; rabbits turned their pink noses up at hares and, when that got too boring and the trends changed, mocked those like them in nearly every way but whose coats did not fashionably change with the season. Their altercations were occasionally physical, but often far harder to stop, and occasionally it felt as though Seff was the only witness to notice at all.
The other wolves did not speak to her, either, so she listened in on their talk, too, and decided she was glad of it. She chewed on her lower lip as she did, a nervous tic her parents instructed her to outgrow. It would leave scars, they said. She'd be mocked or interrogated. The other wolves would stare. Children would duck as they passed her on the street. She dutifully licked up the blood that welled around her mouth and carried on.
As she observed, she walked in wide laps around the playground and snapped the heavier sticks she found into sharp pieces. In the mirror, each morning, she pulled back her lips and examined her teeth all laid out in their rows, and every once in a while she checked to make sure her tongue still bled when she pressed it too hard to them.
Her parents had put her in dresses which she had shed like cocoons. In her teen years, they tried in vain to turn her attention to makeup magazines and boys. It was rare that she would be invited to her peers' houses; she saw their walls decorated with actors and idols the few times she was. She played the viola and joined her school's orchestra. She played and quit five different sports; she was strong, but her coordination only seemed to wane with time. She had ambitions that she left behind seasonally, as easily as a lizard doing the same with its skin. Her form broadened. Her clothes grew duller; her jackets grew thicker. She stood alone at the end of the day and watched her classmates board the buses home as the sun set and the snow fell faster and faster.