In myth Tartarus was the lowest region of hell. So low, it was said, that an anvil dropped from heaven having taken nine days and nights to reach earth would take a further nine days and nights to reach Tartarus. In reality...

'I'd heard many a tale about Tartarus Major, how certain continents were technological backwaters five hundred years behind the times; how the Church governed half the planet with a fist of iron, and yet how, across scattered islands and sequestered lands, a thousand bizarre and heretic cults prospered too.

I'd heard how a lone traveller was hardly safe upon the planet's surface, prey to wild animals and cut-throats. Most of all I'd heard that, in two hundred years, Tartarus would be annihilated when its sun exploded in the magnificent stellar suicide of a supernova.'

These are the stories of the people who are leaving Tartarus, those have decided to stay and those who are arriving on the planet for the apocalypse.