Aries:
The mists gather, softening the world, muffling sounds and hiding objects. They thicken, limiting your vision, until all that remains is you. The world might still be there when the mists depart, but I wouldn't count on it.
Taurus:
The waters rise, carving away the coastal cities, driven by strange tides and once-impossible currents. They sweep onto the land, a steady success of invasions and retreats, eroding farmlands and industrial centers alike, driving the survivors to ever-higher ground.
Gemini:
The melting of the ice caps released them from their imprisonment in Lake Vostok. We do not speak of them; we can barely see them. Their influence is measured by the ever-expanding zone of mysterious disappearances and strange transformations.
Cancer:
The storms roll through, driven by the rising heat of the atmosphere: floods and droughts, side by side, lightning storms that melt buildings, winds that flatten cities. There is no stopping it; it is too late for that, and the underground cities are only a stopgap. They were never meant to be permanent homes for what remains of humanity.
Leo:
The world is empty. We wander through the cities, meeting and parting, trapped in the broken reflections of what was once our world. We cannot form families, alliances, societies; we are gone from each other almost as soon as we meet, will we or not.
Virgo:
It was a magnificent effort: a massive artificial intelligence, self-educating but able to access the whole of the world's knowledge. It was supposed to save us, to show us how to turn back from the edge. Instead, it shut itself down in disgust.
Libra:
It started innocently enough: we were all so tired. It was only natural to lie down and sleep. A few extra hours here or there, to make up for what we'd miss. Maybe an extra day. Maybe two. Maybe a week, or more. Now the last remnants of the wakeful wander through a world of blissful dreamers.
Scorpio:
We had no idea they were among us. It seems very possible they didn't know themselves. Then the signal came, and there they were: marching in the streets in their matching uniforms, rounding up the ones who opposed them: nameless, faceless, all driven by the same will. Perhaps we could oppose them, if we only knew the source...
Sagittarius:
The end of the world came without drama, just a slow grinding down of everything as we used up the last of our resources and all the great achievements of our technology and civilization fell to pieces. Even the great die-off was a slow, gradual thing. Our lives are not bad lives, those that are left, but we live them knowing that we will never again be what our people once were.
Capricorn:
It was that research into psychic phenomena, back into the seventies. Fifty-some-odd years trying to isolate the ability, verify it, tie it to something genetic or trainable. Then they created the children, thinking that children would be well-behaved and biddable. They were so, so very surprised.
Aquarius:
They say it was something at the supercollider that set of the rippling patterns of instabilities, swapping bits of our world for others, turning loose new plants and animals and ecosystems, changing everything. We may yet survive, if we're fast enough to adapt, but we can lose anything at any time.
The stars aligned and that horrible, maddening city rose. The things it loosed -- monstrosities, madness, murder -- made a mockery of our mortal concerns. We live now in a world where that city has always been risen, those things have always been here, and everything has always been this horrible.
