Cody Marby

One century has passed since the Fog invaded our unsuspecting solar system. For generations, life on Earth has been sheltered beneath the ground, away from the exhaustive darkness above. So dense is the substance that has banished us to the depths that it appears almost aqueous in form and is far less suitable for human life than is the open ocean. These days, many people have lived and died without ever seeing the sun. Some were born without a heart that yearns for the warmth of our star—a soul too small for the body in which it resides—and some were not strong enough to try. We who remain do so in a capacity that is undeserving of our past, and tragically devoid of a future.
 
We were alerted to the approach of the interstellar cloud by three separate astronomers—two on Earth and one in the biodomes of Mars. They each noticed that the stars in the western sky had begun to slowly disappear. For years, scientists debated whether or not this phenomenon would affect our view of the sun. Opinions were so scattered that the possibility of danger became diluted in the solution of ideas, and out came a naive fascination for the coming cosmic winter. When it hit, it buried us both in darkness and a shadow of regret so vast that the two became indistinguishable.
 
Most earthlings perished from denial when the Fog arrived. A few tried to enlighten mankind to the dangers that were upon us, but most people preferred to wait for the sands of death to sweep them into its slumber. We who fled formed four colonies—three under the permafrost of the Antarctic, and one beneath the Alps. We lived quiet lives, afraid to alert the darkness overhead of our presence; our new world fashioned by the quaint ghost of a life barely remembered.
 
There were only six survivors from the Martian settlement. They had witnessed their life’s work crumble, and had seen their colleagues starve in the quiet of the night. With tears in their eyes they boarded a ship bound for home, not knowing whether there was even a home to return to. For months, they sailed into the eyes of the horizonless, fearing only that they would catch a glimpse of its soul.
 
We all remember the day the Martians arrived. Three waning souls wept as they discovered our lights in the caverns, and felt the warmth of the Earth’s core. Our welcome thawed their animate corpses, but their spirits still shivered as though they were alone on a planet far away. One man progressed much faster than the others—his eyes as fiery as the forgotten sun.
 
Each week he presented a new plan to expose our convicted star from its iron curtain. Sadly, we were never persuaded to leave our comfortable dwelling. He pleaded for years, but his words were not enough as we had seemingly resigned to our inevitable death beneath the world that had birthed us.
 
One day that man simply disappeared. We mourned, for he had been extinguished by our darkness. We all knew where he had gone: to the surface of our surrender. A group went above to search, desperate and afraid that we had lost him, had lost our only hope.
 
On the peak of the nearest mountain they found his body, his eyes wide open and his headlamp still reaching into the empty heavens. He had kept a diary, and it lay beside him, open. It read:
 
From the lungs of the lingering night
came the cold sigh of death,
and so for one hundred years
we were forced to hold our breath.

Published in the Fall 2016 edition of The Crucible.