Chronology

The Protagonists

 * The story begins during the lives of eleven year old Alice and her older brother Thom, who is in his late teens. They are painting the walls to their living room gold, just before a 'sunhit.' However, as this is considered illegal (anybody caught outside, and as such directly exposed to a sunhit could turn a person to ash. The gold colour might've be used to reflect the light away from the house and could potentially blind anybody who was caught in its line of sight), Thom is taken away to prison to serve three months (the maximum sentence) for endangering life. As Alice is under thirteen, she remains at home with her parents, Edwin and Florena.
 * Mere weeks before Thom is due to be released, the world goes to hell. The sunhits disappear as the gaps between the cold grow stronger, and the world begins to freeze over. The people devise a plan to take the worthiest people (those without disability, those with particular talents, or simply those best able to adapt to the extreme environment) and to travel down to the centre of the Earth aboard the Cascade ('shining' model IV), an earth-ship designed to travel great distances underground. There, they would reside in Ebblissamy, a city they had built around the core, and use the heat to survive until those in high command had created a machine able to travel beyond their universe and find a new home. Alice and her parents are offered a place aboard the ship, as Alice is the daughter of an esteemed medical practitioner (Florena) and a geologist (Edwin). However, they refuse to take eldest child Thom as he is wheelchair bound, now has a criminal record and is unemployed, despite being very intelligent.
 * Refugees, the last surviving members of various now frozen-over planets, flee to the last in the solar system, Alice's. Those like the Spider Dolphins; feral beasts driven beyond domestication by fear, and 'His' people. The Spider Dolphins attack and slaughter most of the remaining population, and those lifeforms who survive are frozen into living statues, as are their unfortunate attackers. All except ancient, immortal creature by name of Mother of Pearl, her monkey, her son Iero, who is barely a week old, and 'He', the last of his kind. They become unwilling allies.
 * Alice receives a phone call from who she believes to be her elder brother, and he comforts her. It is, in fact, one of the Spider-Dolphins, who possess the ability to mimic the voices of the lifeforms they've just killed. Thom was slaughtered in the midst of the panic, although Ace is unknowing to this.
 * Almost one thousand years after Alice's descension, Iero is now in his mid-thirties. His mother instructs he and her monkey to travel to the centre of the planet, where the only heat source - the core - remains and bring it back up to the surface in the hope it will restore the frozen statues. However, upon reaching it he discovers a hidden city called Ebblissamy that coils around the planet's core and befriends two people, a young woman called Ace (who is now in her late teens) and an older man named Firenze.
 * Throughout the course of his time amongst the inhabitants of Ebb (as they call it), he begins to realise that he never actually sees any other people other than Ace and Firenze. He hears about them repeatedly, he dreams about them as such, and for a second perhaps he thinks he spots them out of the corner of his eye or hears a child's laughter, but he never actually sees them solidly and in person. Questioning Ace (of whom he has fallen in love with) and Firenze results in very little, as they very vague on the whereabouts of the other people, and grow defensive if questioned about it. Instead, Ace tells him about her life, what she enjoys and how much she misses her brother, although she realises she cannot remember his name. She shows him the city and the raw beauty of it (the Forest of Lights - which is kept in good repair by keepers Lumos (Lena) and Solis (Silas) - the mechanical fields and the robotic workers, the Mining Caves, the abandoned factories and various others), as many of her creations; one of whom is a little robot who she says she modelled off of her father. Firenze spends his time along in his house, building and building something he can't remember the purpose of but feels as though he must finish.
 * Iero and Firenze discover that the inhabitants of Ebblissamy are in fact shades; mere shadows of who the people once were repeated over and over with no true personality or mind. The heat of the underground has destroyed them from the inside out, and this is, as such, the cause for Ace and Firenze's amnesia. As a combination of strong will and luck, their brains had instead erased the traumatic memories as a way of protecting them, and as such deluded themselves with hallucinations of their families and friends to remain sane. Being brought to terms with this broke Ace (as she was mostly surviving off of the powerful love she felt for Iero at this point), and she began to disappear like everybody else. Firenze was crippled, but he remained just conscious enough to escape alongside Iero and his monkey to the surface world.
 * They travel to Ironside. Iero and Firenze enter a nest of various strewn out automatons and machinery. Amongst them, they find a masterpiece: a roughly ten foot automaton, half of it buried under the dirt, it's yellow eye flickering pitifully. It seems to be sending a distress call, the throat ripped out and the wiring sparking. Iero deduces (with Firenze's) help how much further they have to travel using the number plate on the chest. They move deeper and find a junkyard of many more, strewn around like abandoned toys.
 * The Dark Faeries take away Iero's breath and transform it into a tornado. He is trapped inside, clinging onto a metal post with for all his life. Finally, he succumbs and passes out, finding himself in a Dream World. Firenze is there, as he is a shade and has the ability to fade between dimensions. It's revealed that Firenze caused Ironside, and that he was a traitor.