ESELD
The Wastes don’t kill quickly.
They take a person apart piece by piece, starting with the extremities and working inward until there’s nothing left but a cold core and a fading mind.
First the feeling in my fingers went, then my toes, then the parts of my brain that remembered why walking mattered in the first place. The numbness crept up my wrists and ankles.
I let it come. I stopped fighting hours ago.
I pull off my glove and look at my fingers. The tips are white and waxy, the skin tight and shiny over tissue that’s dying underneath. I try to make a fist. My fingers curl halfway and stop. Frozen in a claw that won’t close or open.
I put the glove back on because there’s no point looking at it.
The army won’t look for me here. They’ll send trackers to the border towns, scouts to the mountain passes, bribes to the smugglers who move people across the lines. They’ll assume I’m running toward something. That’s what deserters do. They run toward safety, toward a new life, toward a future.
They won’t think I walked north until the cold took me. They don’t understand that some people run away from futures, nottoward them. That the only peace I can imagine is the kind that comes with silence.
My legs give out without warning.
Not dramatic. Just a quiet disconnection between what I want and what my body does. One second I’m upright. The next I’m on my knees in the snow with no memory of falling. My legs ignore every command to stand. I look down at them as if they belong to someone else. Some stranger who made the mistake of walking into the white.
I sit back on my heels. I should feel the cold biting through my trousers, but it registers as nothing. Pressure. That’s all.
My body has given up on sensation.
The sky is the color of old iron. Flat. No sun, no clouds. Just a gray ceiling pressing down on the white ground.
A good place to stop.
A good place to…
I close my eyes.
Thud.
My eyes open.
Thud. Thud.
The sound is rhythmic. Heavy. Vibrating through the ice under my knees. Too slow for a heartbeat. Too heavy for a man. The ice crust cracks and groans with each impact.
Bear, maybe. Or wolves. Something large enough to finish what the cold started. Teeth would be faster than freezing.
I search my body for the old responses. The quickening pulse. The surge of adrenaline that kept me alive through a dozen engagements. I find nothing. A vague curiosity about what kind of death has finally caught up.
The footsteps stop.
A shadow falls over me, the light disappears.
I look up.
He is massive. Eight feet of muscle and heavy fur against the sky. His skin is the color of deep glacial ice, not pale but rich and dark. Darker than I expected. His eyes are pale. Gray-white. Depthless.
A Jötunn. A frost giant.
They stay in the deep territories. The places marked on maps with nothing but warnings and blank space. They don’t come to the borderlands. Don’t come anywhere near the places where I’ve been walking.
I’m hallucinating. I have to be.
