Memories of Ice

The sky overhead was colourless, devoid of cloud or even sun, yet faintly illuminated by some unseen source. It seemed impossibly distant — to look upward for too long was to risk madness, mind railing at its inability to comprehend what the eyes were seeing.

So she held her gaze fixed directly ahead as she staggered on. There was nothing to mark the horizon in any direction. She might well be walking in circles for all she knew, though if so it was a vast circle, for she'd yet to cross her own path. She had no destination in mind for this journey of the spirit; nor the will to seek to fashion one in this deathly dreamscape, had she known how.

Her lungs ached, as if they too were losing their ability to function. Before long, she believed, she herself would begin to dissolve, this young body defeated in a way that was opposite to what she had feared for so long. She would not be torn to pieces by wolves. The wolves were gone. No, she knew now that nothing had been as it had seemed — it had all been something different, something secret, a riddle she'd yet to work out. And now it was too late. Oblivion had come for her.

The Abyss she had seen in her nightmares of so long ago had been a place of chaos, of frenzied feeding on souls, of miasmic memories detached and flung on storm winds. Perhaps those visions had been the products of her own mind, after all. The true Abyss was what she was now seeing, on all sides, in every direction-Something broke the horizon's flat line, something monstrous and crouched, bestial, off to her right. It had not been there a moment ago.

Or perhaps it had. Perhaps this world itself was shrinking, and her few frail steps had unveiled what lay beyond the land's curvature.

She moaned in sudden terror, even as her steps shifted direction, drew her towards the apparition.

It grew visibly larger with every stride she took, swelled horribly until it claimed a third of the sky. Pink-Streaked, raw bones, rising upward, a cage of ribs, each rib scarred, knotted with malignant growths, calcifications, porous nodes, cracks, twists and fissures. Between each bone, skin was stretched, enclosing whatever lay within. Blood vessels spanned the skin, pulsing like red lightning, flickering and dimming before her eyes.

For this, the storm of life was passing. For this, and for her as well.

'Are you mine?' she asked in a rasping voice as she stumbled to within twenty paces of the ghastly cage. 'Does my heart lie inside? Slowing with each beat? Are you me?'