In the Cold Fields …
The hatch had blown open on impact. Blood streaked the interior walls, droplets frozen into jagged stars. A trail bled outward from the doorway, not in prints of boots or claws, but in long, uneven striations—drag-marks. Something, or someone, had pulled itself from the wreck and vanished into the storm. Every so often, the snow revealed dark splatters, patches of red, swallowed by white.
Srrrk. Srrrk. Srrrrrk…
The sound came low and steady, like blades scraping through ice. His steps—no, his straddling crawl—marred the silence. A tattered scarf whipped at his throat, snapping in the gale as he forced himself forward. His face was hidden, masked by frost, by the haze of his breath, by the smoke of his own survival.
He walked. He dragged. He endured. On and on, until suddenly he stopped.
“Where… am… I…?”
His voice cracked, nearly lost to the storm. He had been moving so long, too long, that he had not noticed the bleeding had ceased. The injector pulsing in his veins still hummed its cruel mercy, knitting flesh and feeding pain into something bearable. Yet, it was not the chemical alone that kept him upright. Something deeper clung to him. Something that refused to let him die.
He knew. Oh, gods, he knew. That crash should have ended him. It should have broken him against steel and ice. But it didn’t.
The names slipped out first as fragments, then as whispers, each one torn from the marrow of memory:
“En… dou.”
“Eth… an.”
“… Keish… a.”
“… Fr… ed…”
Each syllable shivered on his lips. Who were they? To anyone else, they were just names—static on the wind. But to him? To him they carried weight. His lips trembled as though speaking them held back the void itself. Yet even as they came, his mind recoiled. The memories blurred, fractured, as though something inside him fought to shield—or erase—the truth.
His hair, once ordered, now clung damp and heavy to his brow. His jaw quivered. His eyes, those fierce crimson pupils once burning with purpose, had become hollow wells. Empty.
Any soul stumbling upon him then would have wondered, What calamity could hollow a man so completely? What cruelty of the world had carved him down to this?
Still, the litany of names continued, weaker now:
“Rei… na.”
“… Ke… lm…”
“Eli… sa.”
“… Mille… r…”
Names like ghosts. Each more fragile than the last. Each more sacred. And then, finally, his voice broke to a whisper, softer than the falling snow. His lashes quivered, his breath fogged and thinned, and he surrendered the last of his strength to one final name—drawn out, almost reverent:
“Yvette…”
Then silence. The storm rose in answer, burying him beneath the howl. Snow piled over his form, hardening, swallowing. The sky dimmed. The clouds pressed low.
And in the end—
all became white.