Cold.

  I felt it before I saw anything. It arrived before the light, before my consciousness fully gathered itself in this new pce. Not the chill of a winter morning. Nor the biting wind off the ocean. It was an eternal cold - the kind that clings to bones, seeps beneath the skin, freezes blood in the veins, and locks all life into stillness.

  I opened my eyes.

  Before me stretched a white wastend, dead, endless, without edges or borders. Ice cracked beneath my feet but did not break. The horizon was lost in a dense and swirling blizzard. The wind howled and the sky was so empty, so dark, that the stars seemed like false memories. The universe itself had turned away from this pce.

  Mourning her husband? Or is she simply the Snow Queen? There’s a certain idiot detective whose job is to figure these things out. Only right now, he’s more concerned with keeping all his body parts intact.

  I walked, not knowing where I was going. There were no ndmarks. No signs of life. Only snow. Only wind. I kept moving, feeling the cold sink deeper with every step. But I knew I had to survive. My brain had to believe I could survive. And if I wanted to return, I would have to convince this world that I deserved to.

  My eyes, starved for color, immediately picked out a silhouette against the whiteness. A figure, blurred in the snowstorm, swaying as if unsure whether to move forward. Jasper Longford. Twenty years younger, yet still an old man. Dressed entirely inappropriately for the weather, a suit fit for shareholder meetings and visits of Ghosts of Christmas. But I wasn’t one to judge fashion.

  The deceased walked into the storm, and I followed. A glimpse of direction in the investigation warmed me from within, for there were no other sources of heat in sight. We moved through eternity, and I cwed seconds out of frozen time with every step.

  I didn’t see it at first. The wind, the snow, and my tunnel vision shielded it from my notice, while my reason shielded me from madness. But sooner or ter, the mind’s comforting fictions of our mind crumble under reality’s weight. A mountain of white fur, over which the wind waves crashed against each other. Longford approached it and pced a hand upon it. Instantly, a long, ragged slit opened along its surface, revealing a colossal eye. A fiery pupil focused on the widow’s husband, then tched onto me with its full, crushing gaze. The mountain began to awaken.

  “Agnosia,” I managed to mutter, stepping back.

  A colossal wolf loomed before me. Rabid, unkempt, shaggy, unnaturally elongated, like a shadow trying to slip away from the light. Its twisted maw, warped into a grin, spewed steam, saliva, and the stench of all the dead of Hell. Longford, unfazed, strode between the beast’s massive legs and vanished into the storm, leaving me alone with the monster. I drew my revolvers.

  Even when they allow entry, minds resist intruders. And I am an intruder, seeking their secrets. The worst kind of intruder.

  “Did you sleep through Ragnar?k, little wolf?” I asked.

  The beast lunged.

  The huge cws tore the ice, leaving deep fractures. The breath erupted in clouds of vapor that froze midair, forming glittering ice crystals. The maw gaped open, revealing fangs like shards of a gcier. My hands moved of their own, they knew what to do even as my mind hesitated. Naturally, Zakhar spoke first.

  My arms left behind ghostly trails, blurred shadows, each one firing as well. I created a wall of smoke and fire, as if I were not alone, but an entire squad of spectral gunslingers.

  Thunder. Fire. Bullets shredding through the air. Another motion - three more copies. My body moved faster than my thoughts could process. But the monster kept coming. Bullets struck its fnks, tearing away chunks of fur and frost.

  I leapt aside, slipping free from death’s grasp. She’d have to wait a bit longer for my company. The beast twisted mid-motion, kicking up a snowstorm that swallowed everything around us. Stepping back, I felt the ground vanish beneath me. A slope. Aphasia. The world spun, snow smmed against my face, fingers clenched around the revolvers. Rolling onto my back, I stretched out my arms and unleashed another storm of gunfire. The revolvers burned hot in my grip. The wolf leapt after me.

  I tumbled downward, ice chilling my spine, while the beast slid after me, its paws barely touching the surface. I fired at it, at the sky, at the ice, anywhere to slow the monster. The roar of gunfire blended with the wailing wind, and the fmes before me felt almost warm, as a reminder of life.

  The slope ended abruptly, and I fell into a world that felt even stranger than the frozen wastend above. Ruins. Fragments of something ancient, destroyed yet still grand. Stone columns coated in frost, colpsed arches that once held up the heavens, walls bearing remnants of frescoes depicting faces long lost to time. The lower yers of consciousness.

  I nded on my back, shattering the ice sbs, but sprang to my feet immediately. The wolf, without slowing down, slid after me, its orange eyes burning in the darkness that lurked between the falling snowfkes.

  "Well, that warmed us up, little wolf," I muttered, raising my revolvers. "But let's finish this."

  I leaped to the side, dodging its cws, and dashed behind a broken column. The wolf struck the stone, shattering it into pieces, but I was already elsewhere.

  We moved through the ruins, circling each other, using as covers columns and crumbling walls. The revolvers fired in rhythm with my steps, their thunder filling the void, while the wolf flickered between the debris, vanishing and reappearing, changing its trajectory at the st moment. Stone blocks colpsed under gunfire and the beast's strikes. Dust, rubble, snow, it all blended together, swirling around us as we pursued each other like a predator and its reflection.

  "You're not real," I said, emerging beside the creature’s head, driving my heel into the cracked floor, and firing point-bnk. "You're just her fear."

  And if I stayed here too long... it would become mine.

  The wolf recoiled, leaping back, its eye closed, but still began to generously irrigate the snow with blood. And then it made its final jump, lightning-fast, all-consuming, like the end of days.

  I managed to grab a sharp fragment of stone from the ruins, broken loose by time, and brace it against the ice. The wolf couldn’t stop its flight and impaled itself on the jagged point. Movement ceased again in this kingdom of winter, only the wind toyed with my coat and its fur.

  The fury in its eye gave way to acceptance. It faded away, dissolving into a reality that no longer needed it. Only deep cw marks remained in the snow, untouched even by the storm. It had lost. I had survived. Now I had to find out why.

  I exhaled slowly, my breath swirling in the air before vanishing after Eleonora’s protector. The wolf was gone, but the cold remained. The silence had changed. Not oppressive, but watchful. This world hadn’t let me go yet.

  I holstered my revolvers but left the straps unfastened. Intuition is a living man's best friend.

  The ruins, covered in frost and snow, stood before me, sinking into the ground, jutting out crookedly as if neither earth nor air wanted them anymore. But amidst the wreckage, a silhouette flickered. It moved in the distance, nearly invisible in the snowstorm and the remnants of memory. Longford. He wore the same suit. Looked even more worn, even older. And so was his suit.

  I followed him, keeping to the shadows. If the widow had fixated on this memory of her husband, it meant it was important. Longford walked through the ruins with the weight of a man who had lived in this pce for too long. The wind, like a slighted ghost, faded away, leaving behind only a hollow silence that wrapped around us like a shroud.

  He was heading toward his office, or what remained of it. Once majestic, now it stood half-ruined, its walls crumbling as if reality itself had decided to erase them from memory. A massive desk, charred at the edges, loomed among the wreckage like the st unconquered fortress. Heavy, like an unrepentant past, a monument to stubbornness and power that refused to yield to time or destruction.

  Longford approached the desk and sat down, absently running his fingers over the cold, cracked surface. The motion was reflexive, the gesture of a man accustomed to giving orders, even as his world colpsed around him. But in this world, he was still its master.

  And then the darkness appeared. At first, it was just a blot in the air - dark and motionless, as if light itself had changed its mind. Then the blot began to take shape. A figure, like a shadow draped over emptiness. Bck mourning fabric, slowly unfolding, as if wrapping around an invisible presence. A vague silhouette, shifting in the air. Someone outside Lady Longford’s memory.

  Longford spoke first:

  "The project must be completed," his voice carried through the stone ruins, seeping into their cold. "I can't wait any longer, you know that."

  "We’ll have only one chance," the second voice rasped, dry and charred, like coal cracking in the fire. It didn’t belong to something alive, it sounded like an old film reel stuck on a single phrase.

  I pressed myself against the cold stone. Ambition and schemes. Haste and risk. A perfect cocktail for catastrophe. I listened, trying to catch the meaning buried in undertones and pauses. But the words crumbled before they reached my ears, like ancient spells that refused to be understood by outsiders. Yet I grasped the essence. Longford was no victim of circumstance - he was the circumstance.

  He leaned forward, ced his fingers together, then, suddenly, his head snapped up, and his gaze locked onto mine.

  "Eleonora!" Longford roared, his voice splitting through the dead halls like shattered gss. "Are you eavesdropping?"

  The walls cracked, colpsing into the abyss. Floors buckled like storm waves. The sky tightened into a single point. Reality itself was tearing apart, like an old photograph in the hands of a scorned lover. I had overstayed my welcome.