More than two millennia had passed since the great impact. Most people couldn’t remember what really happened. We just knew about how long it had been and that something huge hit the moon, pushing it out of its orbit around the Earth. That’s when the poles shifted and the tilt of the earth turned sideways.

One half the world was bathed in endless sunlight, scorching most of the land and boiling off most of the sea. It was a searing desert landscape where almost nothing could live. The other half of the Earth was covered in darkness. It became cold and devoid of most vegetation, but for alpine forests and taiga, where some animals could graze still and where predators became scarce but far more fierce than their ancestors.

Most humans ventured underground where their technology and communal hierarchy allowed for subsistence below the earth with hydroponic gardens and sunless light. That light, though artificial, was a finite resource and was no guarantee. Once, about 40 years ago, there was a continent-wide blackout that lasted over a month. There was much chaos; many crops failed and many people died. That’s all it took. One month for our tenuous subterranean civilization to nearly collapse.

People had to go to the surface for help at that terrible time. That’s when they met the “sightless” - the brave, strong yet pitifully blind souls who managed to live in the dark and cold for so many generations.

Aeris and Juda, our grandfather’s two most powerful leaders, led the clan that fled to the surface. When they reached the “seal lock” at the height of our cavernous underground fortress, they told the clan to hold back. Aeris gave the order as Juda and his team of mechanics and grunts unlocked the massive bolts that kept our world safe from the tundra above.

The immense gate creaked open as frozen snow fell through with a cloud of icy dust. Then they blasted through the thick layer of ice that had collected for hundreds of years with their flame throwers and fire wands. Enough ice melted that finally the windy, desolate environ above became clear. Aeris covered his face as head and climbed out first. As he looked up to the sky he had never known all he could see was what seemed like thousands of stars, blanketing the black reaches beyond.

Aeris scanned the surrounding mountainside for signs of life. His eyes adjusted to the darkness but for the starlight much as the blind ones would adjust their clouded eyes to the bright light of our lanterns. Sight, he came to find, was a relative sensation. For, as Aeris once said in his journals, “It seems, by light or dark, mankind was given three eyes: two to look or not, but only one to see.”

The dark and frozen days ahead for Aeris and his two dozen courageous companions, and their unpredictable meeting with the Sightless clan, would certainly prove this wise maxim to be true.