I'm somewhere frigid.
Am I floating? No—sinking.
My flesh feels frozen solid. Thoughts fracture before they form; my limbs seize like brittle wood, and I can't draw breath to fill my lungs. Pain blooms sharp and merciless. The cold invades deeper than my skin, embedding itself in my bones like a slow-burning poison. There is no escaping from this agony.
Pitch-black darkness presses against my eyelids, swallowing every scrap of light. I can't see anything—only the endless void, stretching out in all directions. The ice is a blade against my flesh. So, so cold. An eternity of nothing spins past like snowflakes in a black sky.
I float—suspended in a vast, unending void. The chill burrows deeper than my skin, sliding into my bones like molten iron that never cools. Every muscle locks, every thought congeals, every fragment of who I once was dissolves into this eternal night. The darkness is not only around me; it claws at my heart and consumes me from within.
Time loses all meaning. Minutes stretch into hours; hours collapse into a single, numbing moment. All I know is this relentless chill, the hollow ache it carries, the way it empties me until I am nothing but an echo of sensation. Nothing exists—no light, no warmth, no hope—only endless emptiness.
Then…something stirs. A whisper, fragile as a moth's wing, slips through the still air. It threads through the gloom, winding around my frozen form. At first, it is almost nothing—a breath of warmth that flares and fades like the dying embers of a fire.
A touch, lighter than spider silk, brushes against me. Dancing across my skin, a gentle caress upon my brow. It is so slight, yet it fills me with a hunger I thought long dead.
It is so faint I almost doubt it, yet unmistakably there: a glimmer of warmth, a spark of life in the barren dark.
Please.
Please help me.
I need warmth.
I need to remember.
I can't recall much—only a sliver, a breath of memory. My last thought . . . I believed I would never escape.
Escape? Escape what?
There it is again, grazing my forehead—delicate, fleeting. Yet in that sliver of sensation, I feel the spark of life brighten the darkness.
Now warmth blooms where there is only ice. Nothing touches me now but this tender glow. I want to drift into never waking, to sink into the comfort it offers. It is so soothing. So safe.
Please don't let it fade. Please . . .
The stillness around me stirs. A breeze—soft and curious—flows through the void, brushing my form with invisible fingers. It teases, it tugs. Then it swells, gathering into a swirling current that lifts me and carries me upward into a vast unknown.
Am I falling? No—soaring! Weightless in a silent gale, I spin and twist, caught in the wind. I know neither where nor what I am. I can't see. I can't hear. All that remains is the rush of motion, a rising tide of fear, and the trembling echo of my pulse.
The wind howls in its silent roar, binding me in invisible currents. It tugs me away from that flicker of warmth until I'm swallowed by its relentless embrace.
Stop! I don't want this. Take me back!
Don't leave me alone in the dark.
PLEASE!
But the wind does not answer. It carries me across barren sand, over rolling hills and winding rivers, beyond mountain peaks I'll never know, all unseen, all unknown to me—into the hungry jaws of a shadowed realm.
A forest. A forbidden forest.
Legends whisper that none who enter ever return, that this place is cursed—forsaken at the continent's edge with ancient secrets best left forgotten.
I don't know that yet. Not until I descend.
I do not yet understand these warnings. But I will.
For now, I fall like a solitary star plunging into obsidian roots, carried by the breath of fate down—down—into a cradle of ravenous darkness. And the last flicker of warmth fades into memory.