Chapter 6: Across the Frozen Ice

The first step onto the Frozen River was like stepping into another world. Not colder—there were no degrees left to lose—but emptier. Even the air felt altered, thinner somehow, as if the world itself refused to breathe here. The ice beneath his boots was dense and clouded, laced with spiderweb fractures that stretched endlessly in all directions. Each crack whispered, soft and brittle beneath his weight.

Nikolai kept walking.

Every breath was a razor, slicing through his throat. The wind was gone, yet the cold worsened. A stillness hung over everything, unnaturally perfect, like time itself had frozen with the river. His coat, stiff with frost, crunched as he moved. His fingers had long since gone numb. Pain was no longer sharp—it was distant, muffled, a warning he could no longer afford to heed.

Around him, the river stretched wide, a featureless expanse broken only by ice ridges and jagged chasms. Some cracks pulsed faintly with blue light, as if the ice itself breathed beneath him. Others revealed black depths that swallowed even the dim gray sky above. He avoided those.

In the distance, pillars of ice jutted upward like broken monoliths. One hummed faintly as he passed, a low vibration felt more than heard. It unsettled something in his chest.

He moved slower now. Not from caution, but because each step drained him. Supplies were near-useless—his last strip of smoked meat was frozen solid, brittle as old wood. He tried tearing a piece off, but it wouldn't yield, threatening to pull his teeth out before offering sustenance". Hunger gnawed, but thirst was worse. His lips split, bled. He let the blood freeze there.

Once, the ice cracked beneath him. A thunderous groan echoed across the flatland, deep and ancient. He dropped flat, holding his breath, waiting for the world to shatter.

It didn't. But the silence afterward felt heavier, more expectant.

He pressed onward.

The horizon warped. Light bent oddly here, creating illusions—he saw trees where there were none, movement in the sky that defied clouds or birds. The silence grew sharp. It hissed in his ears like pressure in a deep-sea dive.

He stumbled.

A fissure yawned beneath him, hidden by powder-frost. One leg dropped into the abyss before he could react. His fingers clawed at the ice, nails tearing, until he dragged himself free.

He lay there, heaving, staring down at the darkness. Something shifted in the depths.

A pale shape moved beneath the surface, slow and serpentine. Not fish. Not human. Something between. The ice groaned in protest as if the creature's mass warped the frozen sheet above.

He forced himself up and ran, heart hammering, breath burning.

The cold caught him anyway.

His vision blurred. His limbs ached with leaden weight. His skin felt brittle, like if he moved too fast, it would crack and fall away. He stopped beneath one of the humming towers, curling into himself behind an ice outcrop. He had no fire, no fuel, nothing left but breath—and even that came in ragged gasps.

He dreamed.

The river spoke in fragments—memories twisted and bent. His mother's voice calling his name, reversed and echoed. The scent of roasted meat turning to ash. Fingers, so many fingers, tapping on glass—like the ones he'd seen in the soup, only now they drummed in rhythm, as if remembering him too.

He awoke with frost coating his eyelashes and snow piled in his lap. The ice around him sang—a low, mournful sound that didn't belong to wind or cracking. A sound that felt almost aware.

He kept walking.

Time fractured.

He walked until his legs failed. Crawled. Fell. Lay still. The sky turned from gray to black to nothing. At some point, the river narrowed. The horizon split—a crack in the world. Black trees rose like charred bones in the distance.

The far shore.

He dragged himself forward. Fingers raw, knees bloody. The ice moaned beneath him. Something howled, distant and low. He didn't know if it was a creature or the wind, or something in himself unraveling.

The crackling beneath him grew louder. For one heartbeat, he felt the ice drop slightly beneath his weight. A breathless void yawned beneath it.

His arms buckled. The world tilted sideways. Ice scraped his face as he slid forward the final few inches, reaching out with one trembling hand toward the shore. And then—his body gave out, hollowed and finished. Numbness overtook everything. No hunger. No fear. Just the strange peace of absolute exhaustion.

He collapsed at the edge.

The last thing he saw before darkness took him was a figure—slim, cloaked, silver-eyed—watching from the trees. The snow around her did not fall. It paused midair, as if even nature deferred to her presence.

Then, nothing.