Dawn never came. No sun ever broke through the torrent of rain that descended on us without cease. The acrid stench of smoke or fire was gone. And the water grew icy cold, and the world was white and blinding, and we climbed out of the water and we trudged through a featureless world of snow.

What had become of the Wilderness lands? Where were the verdant jungles and forests? Where were the fields of high grass and wild grain? Where were the thousands who had lived in the villages and settlements?

Our garments were in shreds. And the cold hurt us but it could not kill us. It numbed us. It robbed us of stamina. It closed down on our minds.

Sometime or other, and for a little while, we found the shelter of a cave from which we saw fire on the horizon, the sky beautifully illuminated by this fire with streaks of gold, and red and even green. How indifferent seemed this beauty, how unconscious of witness, yet it touched me and calmed me and I dozed watching it—and then the earth beneath us was shaking violently once more, and terrified of being buried alive, we tried to run again.

Up and up we climbed through what must have been mountains, and soon we saw nothing but whiteness, and the spectacle of fire was no more. Gone forever, it seemed, was anything remotely like fire, and all was lost in a blizzard and in that blizzard we struggled until life itself was nothing but struggle, nothing but seeking for shelter when there was no shelter—until finally I remember wrapping my arms around Welf, holding him as tightly as I could possibly do it, and saying, “I can go no farther,” and the last thing I heard was Welf whispering my name as my eyes closed.

You know now that the four of us survived. You know that we eventually emerged from our frozen graves, and you know how we found one another. But there are other stories someday to be told.

Welf and I opened our eyes many centuries after the destruction of Atalantaya on a later barren and wintry world. We lived a lifetime among the tribes of hearty humans who struggled against the snow and ice eternally as the very conditions of life, with no memory of the great temperate Wilderness lands that had once covered so much of Earth and no memory of such a thing as Atalantaya, though their legends told of ancient gods and goddesses and fallen worlds. The first time we came to consciousness we survived perhaps for three or four human generations before retreating, exhausted and discouraged and broken, to the ice to freeze again.

And there was another awakening after that in a time of simple villages and towns where once again the inhabitants knew nothing of a great metropolis that had once ruled the world.