Min was very very excited. He ran round in circles jumping over the large ropes that trailed the decking.

‘We’re going flying! We’re going to go flying!’

At six years old he knew no fear. His elder siblings however, who had watched as the world around them changed to force this day, had more mixed emotions. Especially, Edan, who at 14, had seen much happier times on North Shoreland. He would miss going Pallo fishing with his father, river rafting with his friends, setting up tents and lighting camp fires during the colder nights. Most of all he would miss his girlfriend, Raner, who’s parents had decided to go south to the capital, Irsa. At one point he’d thought of leaving his family to follow Raner and her family, but his father, Jassen, who’d built the Windcatcher, sat him down and explained why Irsa would become a frozen land within twenty years, forcing five million people to move south again.

Why had it come to this?

Many hundreds of years before Edan was born, the magnetic pole had shifted. If records had stretched far into history, the people of North Shoreland would have seen the cycle . They would have known what was coming. A cycle of death for those who ignored it.