The air is cold and the water is still, in a sea that has forgotten the sun's kiss.

The sails hang limp on the masts. The deck was slick with ice and the masts girdled with frost. The wood groaned a deep, quiet, pitiful lullaby to a sleeping ocean. The sky is still and cloudless, littered with stars. From north to south, from east to west is an unblemished scape of water so still it could be mistaken for glass.

At the prow of the sailing ship that has never met the caress of a breeze since this, its maiden voyage, a man stands with one boot pressed against the rails. He gazes through a spyglass, watching after the shrinking moon.

"It's so small now," a gentle, soothing voice says from just behind the man with the spyglass. "When we set out it was so large I couldn't cover it with my thumb. Now..."

The man looked back, to see a woman standing beside him, holding her arm outstretched towards the horizon ahead. Her finger was pointed straight up, and she had closed one eye, to compare the size of her finger to the shape of the moon on the horizon. "Now it is hardly bigger than the stars it's chasing," the man with the spyglass replied. "But take a look, love. Look at the shape, rather than it's dwindling size. What do you see?"

"It's a crescent. Little more than a sliver."

"The light means the sun is still out there. And the shape, the thin crescent with the light side facing the horizon, means the sun isn't much further away. A few more days of rowing, and we should see it."

The woman wraps her arms around her companion, and hugs him close. "How long have we been chasing the sun? You swear it's still there, and I suppose the moonlight is proof enough. But the sun has not risen in what must be five days. One of the crew whispers of Fimbulwinter, the winter before Ragnarok."

"Ragnarok?" The man asks, with a laugh. But his mirth, like a match, only shouts for a moment before it clings to him and tries to hide from the cold. "Ragnarok. As sane a possibility as any."

"Have you become a believer?" The woman asked. "We must be doomed."

The smile on her face lights up like a lit candle, but fades as if that same flame were snatched away by the wind. She shivers, and wraps her thick cloak tightly around herself. "What do you think has happened?"

The man nods, and folds up his spyglass. "The world's spin is what brings us to face the sun every day, and hide from it at night. If we haven't seen it, I would assume something has happened to the star we drift around. But the moon has been torn from our world's grasp, it wouldn't get smaller otherwise. So I believe something has happened that has pulled us from the grasp of our star."

"Was it the day of earthquakes?"

"They might share the same culprit. I'll know more when we see the sun in a couple more days," the man says. He turned, and kissed her on the forehead. "Get some sleep, love. It's a hard day's rowing."

"Take your own advice, darling," she rebuts, but moves back to her blankets further down the deck. "Being our navigator doesn't exempt you from a turn at the oar."

*****

The drumbeat shakes in the air, and his muscles act out of reflex to pull his oar. He lets out a slow, harsh breath as the wooden handle reluctantly draws close to his chest. Rhythmically, he pushes the handle down and away, until it's as far away as his arms will allow. Only then does he suck in a deep breath.

He chanced a quick glance behind him, to look at the horizon beyond the prow. There was definitely a faint glow, a halo of faint white light just above the water. The sight made his heart leap, and helped him forget the aches of both his arms and legs.

"Dawn!" he exclaimed

All around him, oars were dropped as the dozen people around him stood and scrambled over to the bow of the ship, clinging to the rails to give themselves a better view.

"Dawn, it's sun! It's coming back to us!"

"No!" He insisted. "We have caught it! We won't see more of it unless we keep rowing!"

"Has it abandoned us, then?"

The man turns around to look at the people who volunteered to brave this voyage with him. Simple folk, villagers all. They know nothing of science or metaphysics, nothing of what might have caused their world to slow its rotation, or ripped the moon from the world's orbit. All they know was their homes and world had been torn apart by earthquakes that had lasted hours, that the moon was fleeing, and that the sun had not risen in over a week.

But they row now because he asked them to days ago. A hard week in a ship without wind or warmth. And they do all of this to help him on his voyage to answer this world shaking mystery.

They do this for him. He should not be glib.

"No. It is out there. But something has happened. Something is happening out there, and it will change our fates forever. We need to know what."

"So we keep rowing, love? Chasing the sun?"

"Yes. Until we see it, and know."

******

They row for hours, and it feels as if they are pulling the sun into the sky with every stroke. Oaken oars stained red by hands rubbed raw, shirts are soaked in sweat despite the wintry cold air, and the deck is stained with puddles of sweat and vomit.

It was impossible to say how long they had been at this. He had passed out once, to be silently pulled away to rest as another took his place.

He returned to consciousness just in time to replace someone else who had collapsed, helping to guide the head of a fourteen year old boy to a makeshift pillow and settling a blanket over him. Wordlessly, numbly, he staggers across the deck to the untended oar.

Above and behind him, as he turns back to look at the light on the horizon ahead, he can still see the clear blue sky marred by a haze of red and yellow ribbons. It looked like an immense, still, horrifying imitation of an aurora.

But he felt something on his face just before he turned, something that caresses his sweat-drenched face like the hand of a loved one, and without knowing why, fills his heart with hope.

"A breeze!" he whispers in awe.

Louder, he spins about and exclaims, "A breeze!"

The cheer that erupts around him is deafening, jubilant, and lifts his heart into a joy he hadn't felt since he last stood beneath the light of the sun.

The deck hurled itself into activity, and staggered about to pull the untouched canvas of the sails out. Weary, numb hands moved with strength borrowed from new hope, and in only a few quick minutes a massive white square is raised up into the air.

He watches, breath held and heart quiet, until the limp sail is tugged, and pulls the ship forward.

"Huzzah!" the cry escapes his lips unbidden, and is taken up by everyone around him. "Huzzah, huzzah!"

The oars are forgotten as the single treasure of their voyage, a cask of ale, is opened. Mugs are passed around, food and drink fill hands and mouths, and they drink and dance for nearly an hour until one by one, everyone aboard lies down to sleep.

******

"Wake up!" Someone whispers to him. He can feel a pair of hands on his shoulder, and a slow rocking motion that seems to gently tip his entire body.

"Are those waves?" he asks as he sits up. His entire body aches, and the undersides of his hands sting in pain. He struggles to put it aside, as he shakes his head and tries to stand,

"Yes, but it's not important. It's the sun!"

The voice speaking to him is a frantic whisper, cracking with the hints of puberty. Not quite a man, but more than a boy, it was the same person he had laid down to rest just before they had caught a breeze.

He looks around, and sees everyone else aboard is still asleep. He looks back to the boy, and asks, "what about the sun?"

"Look!"

He looks up.

At ruin.

There is a haze of red fire reaching from one side of the horizon to the other. The haze is broken in places, stretches uniform in others, and glows both majestically and ominously. The light stretches across the open sky, like paint dumped and then smeared on a canvas.

Or like the guts of a deer in the snow, as a pack of wolves tears into it.

But that is not the most terrifying thing in the sky. At the heart of this unmoving maelstrom of fire, there is a corona of red and yellow, large and surprisingly dim. It is hazy and unfocused, like looking at something from underwater. But at its heart, surrounded by blinding light, is a small black dot.

"What is that?"

"The end," he whispers. "Our end. The end of everything."

"What?" The boy cries out. His shout is enough to rouse a few others, who stagger to their feet and stare up at the sky. One of them weeps, and others shout in confused disbelief.

"What could that be?" the boy asks. "Is that Fenrir, devouring the sun? Are we witnessing Ragnarok?"

The man knows better. He knows what that dot is, and he knows with crushing certainty what it means. Knows there will never be another sunrise, that the world will grow cold and dark in a winter that could last forever.

But as he looks around at the crowd of people gathering around him, their wide eyes fixed on him, he cannot find the words to share the horror in his heart. Instead, he takes a deep breath, and tells a lie that might as well be truth.

"We are," he says, and he points up. "We have been cast loose. Our world is a ship, and for all of our lives, we have been moored to the sun. But a darkness that devours has come for the sun, and it's last act was to hurl us away."

"Does that mean we are saved?"

"From the devouring dark, from Fenrir. But we are not ready to sail the dark seas between the stars. We will have a winter without end, a winter that will get so cold, the air we breathe will freeze and fall from the sky like snow."

"Then what can we do?"

"We turn for home. Find warmth," he says, with more hope in his voice than he holds in his own heart. "And teach our children to become ready. We sail the darkness between the stars now, possibly until all the stars go out. We will learn how, because we have no choice."

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