The room had been a mausoleum, frozen in a perpetual dirge. Ice had clung to the walls like the skeletal fingers of forgotten gods, creeping forward with an indifference that had felt almost sentient. The wind outside had screamed, a banshee's wail that had rattled the hollow bones of the world. There had been no sun, no warmth, no promise of dawn—only the smothering embrace of an eternal winter that had long since stolen the will of those it hadn't yet killed.
Ezra had sat hunched in the corner, his body a crumpled effigy of a man who had once been. Beside him, the German shepherd had pressed its trembling frame against his, not out of love but necessity, as if they had been two dying embers struggling to stave off the inevitable darkness. The dog's eyes had glistened in the half-light, pools of glassy resignation that had reflected Ezra's own emptiness.
The room had been silent, but his thoughts had howled like the wind outside, a cacophony of despair and bitter irony. "The world is a graveyard, and we are its ornaments," he had mused, staring at the frostbitten wall with eyes that had long since lost their luster. "There was a time when men built monuments to their gods, when they carved their names into stone as if they could etch their immortality into the fabric of the earth. And now? Now we sit in frozen tombs, waiting for the cold to sculpt us into statues. Motionless. Lifeless. Eternal."
He had tightened his grip on the dog, his fingers numb and wooden, as though they had belonged to someone else. The animal had stirred faintly, a shallow breath escaping its lips like the last whisper of a dying prayer. Ezra had felt its warmth ebbing, a slow exodus that had mirrored his own. "We are candles in the wind," he had thought, "melting not with the defiance of flame, but with the quiet indignity of wax collapsing under its own weight. Soon there will be nothing left of us but a puddle of what we once were."
A droplet of water had fallen from the ceiling, striking his left eye. The sensation had been sharp and jarring, as if the ice above had chosen to mourn him with a single, bitter tear. He had blinked, his vision shattering into fragments as the droplet had smeared across his cornea. For a moment, the world had seemed to warp, its edges curling inward like a photograph set too close to the fire.
"Even the ice pities us," he had thought, a grim smile tugging at the corners of his chapped lips. "It weeps for the dying, though it cannot thaw us. It is a cruel god, this cold, offering grief without mercy. Tears without salvation."
The dog had tilted its head, its gaze fixed on Ezra as if searching for something—an answer, a reason, a shred of hope. Ezra had met its eyes and had felt a pang of guilt, sharp as the frost biting at his skin. "Do you blame me?" he had wondered. "For dragging you into this? For sharing my grave and calling it companionship? Or perhaps you envy me, because I know what I am. I am not a man. I am a shadow pretending to have weight. I am the breath that fogs the air for a moment, then vanishes, as though I was never here at all."
Time had stretched, an unbroken line that had refused to end. Minutes, hours—what had it mattered? In that frozen purgatory, time had been a mocking illusion, a pendulum that had long since frozen mid-swing. Ezra's thoughts had grown slower, heavier, as if the cold had seeped into his mind and crystallized his very soul.
"We are the last verse of a poem no one will read," he had thought, his eyelids growing heavier. "The final notes of a song sung to an empty room. And when the silence comes, it will not mourn us. It will not remember us. It will simply be."
The dog's breathing had slowed, its chest rising and falling in fragile rhythms, until even that had ceased. Ezra had held it close, his arm tightening in one final act of defiance against the cold, against the silence, against the void. His own breath had come in shallow gasps, the mist fading until it, too, had disappeared.
"Perhaps this is mercy," he had thought, his consciousness slipping like sand through fingers. "Perhaps the cold does not kill us, but preserves us—keeps us from decaying into the madness of what we might have been. And if the universe is indifferent, then so too must I be. The wall stares at me, and I stare back, and neither of us will blink."
His heartbeat had faltered, a final, fragile note in the symphony of his life. His vision had darkened, the frostbitten walls dissolving into shadows. And in that infinite silence, Ezra had thought he had heard the faintest sound—a laugh, distant and absurd, as if the universe itself had found humor in his demise.
And then, nothing.
" Oh, cruel mistress of frost and despair,
You weave the night with your frigid snare.
Your breath steals warmth, your touch takes life,
Your beauty a blade, your love a knife.
But deep in the shadows where none dare tread,
Lies the ember of a god long thought dead.
The Sun, imprisoned, his light turned weak,
Yet his whispers of hope are all that I seek.
To shatter your crown of frozen spite,
To pierce the veil of eternal night,
I'll wield my grief as a sharpened blade,
And strike where even the cold must fade.
For though you reign with a heart of ice,
No winter can last, all seasons have price.
And when your frost crumbles, when you are undone,
Then you shall kneel to the rise of the Sun."