I hate winter that lasts long.

The air and the walls had felt dead, suffocating and cold for times long past. Time seemed to be heavy even on the stones of the room, as ice perpetually resurfaced, making whole the unused memories.

The wind from outside howled, fury what raged at the cracks around giving it a deep sorrow. All of this was an old tale once; however, it was all that remained.

The sun had told those trapped within that there was not one, and neither did any springs hint, leaving winter during everything it once was.

An echo of winters Great Himalayas was all the room was sharing. Of what had remained and could never be.

Ezra was lost in the corner while a shred of him remained and sat close hoping warmth could be found, but warmth had ceased to exist within him. Beside him sat a German shepherd, not caring for Ezras gentle touch but the need to cling on for dear life. It's lifeless, weary, drained eyes shimmered which artlessly crawled and tore through Ezra's emotions.

There was no sound in the room, it was perfect for reflection to take place, so Ezra's tore his head apart. 'What dreadful and hopeless outlook men can have on the world. The world is nothing more than a graveyard and we are but hollow monuments of Idiots', he said while muting himself with a stare at the wall. "It is such a foolish thought for a man to carve a stone with his name on it. We wait for the grave's cold embrace only for us to be up again. Displayed in silence rough and tough but for what? Eternity?"

He felt his fingers sink in to the dog's soft skin while his hands began to rigidly lose sensation. He had kept his hand firmly wound around the dog even after noticing his fingers had turned numb slightly as they felt as if they were not his. The animal had let out a shallow breath making its lips move, looking like the animal was whispering something.

Ezra could feel the warmth it had enveloped him in gradually fading away just as he himself had been doing. "We are candles in the wind" he thought "if we are ever melting, it doesn't happen due to flaming hot defiance, rather just a wax that looses its rigidity, especially when it goes through great tribulations. That's all there will be left of us, just puddles of what we used to be."

Something cold hit his face, followed by some warm water, a single droplet hit Ezra's left eye as it felt like ice was able to begin crying for him. It had felt jarring and sharp, as if there was once a layer of ice that had melted. As he blinked his cornea was smeared by the droplet and it felt like his vision started to shatter into broken pieces.

He had the briefest of moments in which everything felt like it was slowly melting, it was akin to taking a picture and overheating it or bringing it too close to a bonfire.

"Hell, even the ice shows us some mercy," he mused, while a bitter smile creased the edge of his cracked lips. "It hates those who are wretched but fails to uncoil them. Ice is a ruthless master, it seems, bestowing sorrow on those who seek warmth. Water without redemption."

The dog had slightly lifted its gaze towards Ezra as though trying to find an explanation, a purpose, or a ray of hope. Seeing the dog, Ezra felt an excruciating sense of guilt akin to the icy winds piercing his flesh. "Do you blame me?" he has queried. "For enticing you into this mess? Sharing my coffin and calling it love? Or do you actually feel jealous of me, knowing thyself? I am not man. I am a shadow masquerading as one. I am the vapor that obscures vision for a brief instance and then dissipates into nothingness."

Minutes, hours, it didn't really matter in purgatories unending stretch, a stretch that was neither a line nor bound by any time. Time was a blasphemous mirage in that bitterly cold emptiness, a clock that had long been suspended mid rotation.

Ezra's thoughts began to move at a funereal pace and weight, as if the bone chilling air had invaded his very being and frozen it.

"We are nothing but the final lines of a poem, which will never be read," he had imagined, with his eyes striving hard to remain open. "The last few chords of a song performed in a deserted ballroom. And the quiet that follows would not sorrow our absence. It would not recall our presence; it simply would be."

The dog's breath had started to become soft, its chest gently going down and up until that too stopped. Ezra put everything around him in close proximity and squeezed it as his last rejection of the chilling feeling, the deep silence, and the emptiness. He himself had been breathing in a laborious manner, with the fog disappearing until it was no longer in existence.

"Perhaps this is mercy," he thought, his mind slipping away from him like sand through fingers. "Perhaps it is the cold that saves us, rather than killing us so that we do not rot into the insanity of who we could be. And if the cosmos doesn't care, then I also should not care. The wall looks at me as I look at it, neither of us blinks."

His heart had stopped, a last, weak note in the music of his existence. He was no longer able to see anything; the walls that were frostbitten had turned into darkness. And in that terrible silence, Ezra thought he heard something in the distance — a laugh that was so far away and insane that it sounded as if the universe was laughing at his demise.

And then there was 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."