[b] Bitter Cold [/b] The green, dew-bitten grass and my skin felt not the warmth of the sun. My mind felt not the light of the traveler. The darkness surrounded, and all that was left was the cold. I stared to the sky, and there was the traveler. The darkness surrounded it, trapping it in a cage of black. I called to my ghost. The bitter wind answered. I shivered, my robe shook. The darkness blinded my view, the traveler disappeared to the black. I was falling to it. “You are a dead thing.” The voice resonated throughout the dark. The wind stopped, and the sun shone through the dark. I felt the warmth touch me again, felt the light surround me. I left the earth, the stars made their presence known as I flew through space. The crimson leaves of Arcadia met me when I touched down. Radiolara flowed in the distance. I stood in the midst of a garden, the figures of ghosts growing from the waves of flowers. The warm breeze blew past me. “You are a dead thing made by a dead power in the shape of the dead. You do not belong here, this is a place of life.” I looked at the flowers. “I stand not in a place of life. You take the form of a machine who raises the dead, and you grow on a planet taken for machines.” “The dead find no say amongst the living. They shall not say against a place of life.” The flowers answered “Who are you, why have I come here?” “Who are you, why have you come here?” The flowers repeated. I walked through the flowers and found a small clearing. Only one flower stood in the center of the clearing. I reached out to pluck it. It cut me, and I held the flower in my hand. I bled, and the blood was light. “You are a dead thing made by a dead power in the shape of the dead. You do not belong.” The crimson of Arcadia grew in intensity, flowing like blood, mixing with the Radiolara. The colors turned black and swirled like the wind. The warm breeze turned cold, the dark surrounded me once again. The flower froze in my hand, shattering into nothing. I looked up, the Traveler hung in the sky. It turned to ice, and it too shattered. The remnants fell and struck me. I bled light, it warped into radiant darkness. When my ghost raised me from the winters of Old Russia, I had a thorn-cut in my right hand, and frostbitten wounds scattered around my body. They have not healed since. The cold still lingers. (#Finished)