“For a thousand years the sun has dawned without end. For a thousand years and a hundred thousand sunrises there have been a hundred million bodies graced by warmth and light, but no more. So many organs are ripe for the harvest and yet so many bodies have already been wasted and left to rot. By my own hand this will end today. By the stroke of midnight the black sun will rise and this perpetual cycle of birth and decay will at last find its end. I will erect a monument to hubris and man’s eternal ability to struggle for something that isn’t there and never was. I will burn down every building and erect a monument to their futile stand against the sun from the charred corpses inside. I will bring an end to this cycle and the black sun will at last rise once more to dawn a new age of eternity.” “And so let it be done.” Anya is one of the lucky few soldiers with enough strength and fortitude to be granted true power through bodily augmentation. Through the many long years of her short life much has changed in the world. Where there was once subsistence farming now there is mechanization through flesh. Where once there was war fought in endless waves of bodies thrown at each other’s swords, now there is only a meat grinder. Where once there was honor in combat now there is only death, and yet she would survive. But when living bundles of unwrapped and contorted flesh find themselves in the streets, the soldiers’ fixed-rate guns can find only so many targets. The limited shots are consumed faster than the endless waves of those now controlled by something else can pour ever-forward— their organs wasted away, replaced by the black-white flesh of some infant cosmic being trying to force its way into the world despite all resistance. Anya finds herself in the barracks as one of the lucky few training at T0, but for all their guns and ammunition, it can’t possibly be enough. Can she survive to midnight? It isn’t clear, but if she can just live to see the next sunrise, it will all certainly be over.