-Prologue-

We were running. Backpacks hitting our shoulders, dodging the still cars and the falling chunks of debris set free from the buildings around us. Navigating around the benches, decorative trees and other obstacles on the dead street, desperately putting one foot after the other. We couldn't stay home after the last remaining information we gathered. It was an ancient loudspeaker, announcing the coming impact of a meteor roughly 35m in diameter in our city. This was the last working, and simplest tech in the area.

We were instructed to head to the nearest subway station, as it would be deep enough to shield us from most of the impact, but the city around us would be destroyed. So, we ran.

The showers now were almost like meteorological phenomena, raining bright white stones like bullets. We couldn’t rest however, and we had to keep going, as the bombardment of these small, pebble sized meteors were the precursor for the massive one heading our way.

“How far is the station?” my father asked. He was tall and skinny, just like me, with dark eyes and greying hair, from constantly working two jobs to support us.

“It’s not far now, a few hundred meters.” I panted. I was out of shape, but after the apocalypse started, I had to get in a bit of exercise if I wanted to survive. My endurance was still horrendous though.

Running in the shadows of the few remaining buildings intact, we continued our journey in the skeleton of the city I grew up in. We had a few days' worth of food and basic necessities in our packs, but we were running low. Honestly, things were bad. No electricity, no water, no communications, we could only hope there were other people down there that could help us. The crackling, screeching voice of the announcer came again. This was some cold war tech right here.

“Estimated impact in ten minutes. I repeat, impact in ten minutes. Find shelter immediately. I repeat…” There were still a few places that had primitive technology that could be used, and a simple coil with a magnet in speakers wasn’t too complex. Anything with a microchip in it, however, was destroyed as soon as the first meteors came down a few months ago. Things only went downhill from there.

Finally, we reached the subway entrance. It too was covered in large chunks of concrete and has almost completely collapsed under its own weight. We saw a gap between two concrete panels that fell down and squeezed through. We slid down the broken escalators. The subways were indeed down deep underground, but not so much that it wouldn’t be impossible to destroy. I was beginning to get worried.

Soon we reached the bottom, and saw a few people, maybe a hundred with frightened, dirty faces looking at us. We just collapsed from the exhaustion of having to run all this way, and half sat down, half fell onto the concrete floor.

The echoes of the impacts of small meteors were still audible even this deep. It reminded me of rain pattering on the window, but in a much more terrifying, this could kill you any second kind of way. We only had a few minutes until the impact.

The problem with these meteorites was that they didn’t vaporize or disintegrate in the atmosphere and came all the way down to the surface. From the few I’ve seen, it was made of a glassy, white marble looking material, that after hours down at the surface, sublimated into the air, leaving nothing behind. These were not normal meteorites, nor a normal asteroid.

It finally arrived. I could still feel the sonic booms that penetrated my bones and shook up all my organs. It was like it was right above me. I looked at my dad, and I could see the terror in his eyes as well.

“It’ll be okay, Eli. We’ll figure something out.” He whispered to me. He was like that, trying to calm me down even in this situation, where he was just as terrified or more than anyone else. He began glowing with a soft blue light. My eyes widened. What is happening? I wanted to tell him, or ask him something, anything but then…

Another explosion shook the whole station. This was much bigger than the mere sonic booms as the meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere. It was right above us. In a fraction of a second, a few things happened. First, the ceiling caved in, and thousands of tons of dirt, concrete and debris fell from the ceiling. At the same time… my father also exploded. Not in a dirty, smokey way, but in a brilliant, blue glow that was hard to look at. He was looking at me, arms extended, as he was trying to protect me from the falling debris with his body.

But he didn’t protect me with his body. Instead, I was encased in ice, a massive glacier made from brilliantly shining, beautiful blue ice. It started spreading, enveloping me in its cold, but comforting grip, protecting me from the falling chunks of the ceiling. It grew a few meters thick, before a flying chunk of metal hit my dad in the chest with such velocity, he went flying. I couldn’t turn my head after him, as it was locked in place by the several tons of ice surrounding me.

I could still move my eyes, and I caught a glimpse of him, and he sent me a reassuring smile before more rubble buried him completely. Tears formed in my eyes, that immediately froze and stuck to my eyeballs. I forcefully blinked twice, but it required effort. I could feel myself gradually getting colder and colder. My father was dead. I wanted to scream, but my jaw was cemented in place.

Another explosion shook the ruined station, and then I saw it: the soft, oily glimmer of a boulder made of white marble. It poked through the destroyed ceiling, just above my head. As it lost its momentum, having to get all those tons of rubble and soil out of the way, it came down slowly, and with a soft clunk, it stopped at the top of my glacier. I felt my consciousness slip away into the cold embrace of the ice, and I blinked my last tear out of my almost completely frozen eyes and closed them for the last time.