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Kostya & America - Russia

It's cold again, but it's been that way for as long as anyone can remember. Kostya has no idea what caused it, but neither did anyone else he was in contact with. Most communications cut out shortly after the first ice storms began, and even runic power devices had failed: he remembers watching his pendant slowly dying with no way to recharge, the teal lights flickering out.

All he knows is that it had been big, and that it had affected the world. That was enough.

There was nothing left, except the likes of short-wave radios and the ineffable number stations, that played into the long, long nights in the wintry and global blackouts.

He listens to them, sometimes, on a receiver powered by crank. It's often a woman's voice, staticky and bland, reading a sequence of numbers on repeat. Sometimes, as he forages for supplies in abandon buildings of crumbling cement and rusted foundation irons, he wonders what happened to her, or if she was a real person at all.

It is so, so cold, and he cannot feel his fingers. He opens the door to the bunker, returning with little more than a dented can and two rounds of ammunition for a gun he does not have. Kostya has always been a survivor, but the pickings run leaner and leaner with each passing day. He slides into the cot, pulling the blanket over him and his sleeping ally, whose turn it is tomorrow to seek out supplies.

We need to move, he murmurs, huddling closer for warmth, against the shock of red hair that is hers, and she nods and says that she has been packing.

It is of little surprise. They are in sync, and step in time to the same drum when the time calls for it. It was how they had survived. It is how they would continue to survive, lean and mangy cats in the dredges of a society that had self-destructed, the bottom of the barrel that refused to simply lay down and die.

They're stronger than that.

Leslie - Antarctica Base

The first strikes landed off the cost of Cuba, someone had told him in a clinical and condescending tone, and the Island was not very far from from that indeed. The force of the quakes and waves that followed demolished the lighthouse and the portals, and flooding happened almost immediately, up to the knees.

Every hunter was instructed to collect as many tablets as possible and send them through a portal opened by an impatient Dr. H, and it turns out that under pressure Leslie caved and obeyed authority when he had to, and so like a good Mist he'd done his share of transportation until he had to literally swim through the portal with his last three.

And now, he was here, in the only place that would be unaffected by a nuclear winter:

Antarctica itself.

Ancalagon

She was just so hungry, all the time, in a way that consuming no minipet could quench. Ancalagon was a dragon, mighty and ferocious and slavering jaws and razorwire claws and fangs dripping acid, a creature a hundred feet tall with a larger wingspan and-- and yet.

And yet, it was if there was no one left to be afraid of her. She felt hollow inside, cruelly mean and full of the desire to take, but every day there was less and less to take in the world of Halloween.

The oranges grew duller. Pumpkin patches shuttered, because there was no fear to spare, even from the willing. Contraband was found almost constantly on Boogeymen searches, which were slowly becoming more and more frequent affairs. They asked her boring questions: if she'd been to the human world recently, had she killed anyone, had she taken anyone hostage, did she know anyone who fit either of these profiles, did she know anyone who she simply suspected of such actions.

Neighbors turned against neighbors, and the chilly perpetual-Autumn air seemed to get a little colder with each day.

I need it, she thought, desperate. Fear me. Love me. Look upon me and know misery, know despair, know hatred. The fear-thin air gave to her a pale shade of what it felt like to be well and truly nourished.

Some days, she daydreamed of killing a human, slowly. To do all that the Boogeyman said not to do under threat of passport revocation and fear-empty chambers in prison, isolated and alone.

But Ala hungered, and she had never been a very patient or a very smart ghoul. Instead of warning her away, it called to her like a moth to the flame, and so she returned to the Haunted House every day, hunting. Hungry. The Boogeyman could warn all they wanted, but the House granted entrance to the curious and the needy, and oh, how Ancalagon thought herself to be both.

And so, in the dead of night, she went into the Weeping Woods, where she had gone to artifact hunt, searching for one of the sporadic portals that would let her cross the thresh-hold. The world that greeted her was cold and empty, and worst of all, its empty air felt worse by a nigh imperceptible amount, proof of how small and smaller Halloween was becoming. Ala removed her pin, shifting into her natural shape that was...smaller, than it used to be, and less impressive. She walked amongst the wreckage and the cold, no longer afraid that Boogeymen would spare the troops to round up a single student, her fear signature weakening by the day.

Because she walked for days, and saw nothing. She walked for days, and saw no one. Abandoned cities, wrecked skyscrapers, broken-in stores and metal-machines for movement as far as the eye could see, left with open doors and no supplies. There was not a human in sight, and she wondered "What is my purpose?" until there was no wonder left in her at all.

She was not the first to fade away, and she would not be the last, forgotten and weary and nothing at all.

Kostya & America - Russia

Callous and self-serving above all. It was her existence before the island, before Konstantin. It was not so terrible to return to. Self was now four instead of one, and despite the world turning into an empty and hostile landscape, she has yet to feel lonely within it.

The paring down of everything into simple movement and survival was an urge she'd so rarely allowed herself to indulge but always quietly longed for. Was it any wonder that America now thrived? That she didn't long for the pockets of normalcy that were heralded by roadside graffiti?

They were usually just traps anyway.

The world had a way of consuming those who looked back too often. It was true before and was true enough now.

Hadiyya - Halloween

She was cold. So cold, warmth was a fading memory, lost, like so much else. The djinn was cold down to her core, an aching, bone chilling iciness like the oceans where water runs deep and black, and nothing lives but the hardest of creatures. But this is not living, not really. Endurance, out of stubbornness, or pride, or fear of the unknown. Clinging to life, because who knew if there was anything after?

No, not life. Existence.

The djinn existed, but how long now had she lay motionless amid dust littered sheets and endless curtains of dark hair. A lavish room, a large bed mounded with pillows. Lamps and lanterns once burned on carved tables, it had been a her paradise, and now it was her tomb.

It was impossible now to piece together the chain of events. The djinn was not sure what had happened first, the fading of the pets, or the halt in breeding. Both had struck heartbreaking blows, but it was nothing to what came next. The crumbling of their world, reality unraveling at the edges, and still they persevered, carrying on as normal a life as they could for as long as was possible. But even that did not last.

When the first of them faded it had been shocking, terrifying. Then, as more and more fell to the lack of fear, those that remained had been forced to face the inevitable. They were dying. Truly dying.

Hadiyya was alone, she did not know for how long, only that she was alone. Consciousness was a waning thing. The djinn was not truly awake, but nor was she sleeping. She lay in a tangle of sheets and her own hair, and she waited to fade.

Blood ran like ice through her veins, slow and sluggish, her heart barely beating. There was nothing left, nothing to linger for. nothing. It was time, she was not afraid, had not been, for many years. If she had had the energy she might have quickened her end, but as the fear had faded mobility had left with it. Lethargy that had worsened until Marosa had dubbed her his sleeping beauty.

Marosa...

She should have faded first, weak, helpless. It should have been her. But she had felt the Fey grow cold beside her over time until he was simply not there. And she had longed for the end, then. Had begged for it, had prayed, and it had not come.

Now.

Finally.

Her heart beat, a soft, unsteady pulse, weakening by the minute. It was time, and there was enough of her left to be grateful for the dark embrace of nothingness that pulled her down.

A reprieve from the cold, from the loneliness that had eaten away at her mind. Blessed oblivion, at long last.

Her heart gave a sluggish beat, and another...then that cold blood slowed, stopped, and there was nothing.

An empty bed, within a dust filled room, in a ruined town, and a dying world.

Thezil

In a way, the fading edges of the world were proof that he'd been correct. In a way, they proved that he was wrong, too, but Thezil was stubborn if anything. Every day, the junkyard got emptier and emptier, objects crumbling and fading as the world fell back into an inert state.

Sometimes, he went around the town, and on rare occasions, he visited the school.

She was still there.

In the end, he holds the tv that was his first head in his arms-- a book atop his head in its place, the dusty pages large and scrawled upon and a little torn-- and brings it to her.

"It's for you," he rasps, through the pages as they flip, the words appearing before he made the sounds, written on the page in jagged black ink. "It's just us."