A symphony. In retrospect, that was the first incongruity. The customary racket of the ceiling fan - in rather dire need of lubrication or replacement - was so deeply ingrained into the first moments of his day that the tune now visiting his ears, produced by the alternation between silence and the wind, was disquieting despite its serene melody.
The wails of the wind stood out like the chorus of a song playing on loop in his head, further detail too fuzzy to place. Beginning with a couple of discordant notes, the tune began its descent into erratic noise, eventually leaving no trace of the underlying melody. What it finally ended up sounding much like was distant, twisted screams of hopeless agony.
The unfamiliar warmth seeming to come from his blanket was the first refuge his confused mind sought, yet at the very initiation of action, the warmth simply ceased to exist. His attempt to grasp the blanket only managed to startle him into finally fully waking, just as what should have been cloth crumbled away in his hands.
There was no warmth, no blanket, and the cacophony in the background was certainly no melody. His eyes reflexively snapped open, but couldn't quite take in the whole scene, while uncertainty and panic flooded out all attempts at thought. He squinted, blinked and then refocused his eyes, almost expecting nature to reconfigure itself around him. Nothing of the sort happened.
The hypothetical blanket, rather than being absent, ubiquitously traversed his entire field of view, a desert of pure snow hedged by a massive mountain range at the horizon. The twilight of dusk - or possibly dawn, impossible to discern - leaked over the edge of the mountains and seeped in through the skies, filling them with strange gradients of magenta and neon, further hidden behind the thin curtain of the falling snow. Faint traces of other hues crept into the dominant blues of the aurora above.
The whole scene seemed staged, an unnatural balance of black, white and color, yet the sensations were so compelling, so convincing, that his curiosity regarding his location began to outweigh the portion of his mind still in shock and undecided on whether to accept the reality of it all.
Seeking freedom from his shallow burial beneath the snow, he tried to lift his weight on one side, supported by his elbow. The hand that broke free of the snow gave him a sudden shock that involuntarily jerked him a few inches away. Stretched out was a skeletal facsimile of a hand, bones in motion coordinated by leathery, exposed muscles. It was completed with a distributed paucity of gaunt, pale skin, bones protruding at some of the knuckles, and hands blackened, probably as a result of extreme haematoma.
Reality only set in as he tried desperately to distance himself from it. His thoughts were in complete synchronization with the motion of the arm. The clotted blood splintered, most of it crumbling off his fingers like debris in an aftershock, while one thick stream, more black than red, began a meandering path down the sides, splitting in two branches at another protrusion of bone. Both of the rivulets found their way into the sea of snow below, which darkened first before settling into a shade of red as the blood dissipated. He made a tight fist for confirmation, and got the expected reaction. The arm was indeed his own.
His mind was now lost, frantically racing. His elbow, unable to take the angled thrust required to free the rest of his body from the snow, slid back down far too smoothly, as if the ground was metal. He shoveled away some snow, finally noticing how weak his sense of touch had become, and how immune he was to the freezing temperature that must have been surrounding him.
The snow he removed, now a light pink from the blood within, lay in a mound at the foot of which was lustrous, glossy ice, clearer than any mirror he had ever seen. In it was an otherwise perfect reflection of his bleeding hand, only vitiated by an eerie sapphire hue appearing to be originating below.
The blueish lighting swirled strangely in and around his arm, moving with the reflection of the hand above. He widened the aperture of his mirror by clearing out more snow, and noting his trepidation, braced himself before peering down at the face of the reflection of the body he was in.
The aggregate of his life's fears paled in comparison to the surge of terror that washed over him in that moment. A ghastly image stared back at him from below as though with evil portent, the skin pale, sinewy and diffused. There was an uncharacteristic symmetry to it, directing focus to the mystical inlays with azure gleams on either side of an appendage of bone that was once a nose. Each was an abyss, drawing him in to fathom the depths within, but also immobilizing him from any physical movement through absolute fear.
Time passed as he sat there motionless, he had no idea how long it had been. His thoughts had momentarily drifted to the monsters of ancient mythology that supposedly avoided open water in fear of their reflections, and how he could surely empathize with them now. In attempt to regain equanimity, he shut his eyes and began to think, lying back down to escape the physical position he'd been held in for so long that he was covered in snow again.
The whispers of the winds returned at once, and entwined within were the same phantom wails and horrid screams. They were punctuated by varying lengths of silence, which he found to be far more disturbing than the screams themselves. The added perplexity of his mismatched sensations bothered him as well - as the winds oscillated between zephyr and tempest, the tactile response remained imperceptible against the auditory one.
Every time a pattern in the sounds emerged, it quickly returned to a state of randomness, leaving him at a loss on whether to trust his hearing in his current state. A trace of repetitive sound however was discernible when he shifted his entire focus to the unlikely composition. There was an embedded metronome, a low, rhythmical clanging, held still in the air as if reverberating despite the vast openness of his surroundings.
Every sense was now deceiving or distracting him. His touch was gone, thankfully so, the cold and the pain in his current state would have been intolerable. His eyes were showing him glows that weren't there, ears recording sounds that shouldn't exist. In frustration, he decided to seal his ears the best he could, completely cutting off the intake of information overwhelming him. The blood of his newly released hand flowed into his aural cavities, and strangely enough, he could feel it quite well.
The face in the ice was not unfamiliar. The line of the jaw and size of the bone at the nose matched well enough to his own, to the face he was more accustomed to looking at in a mirror. The transformations hinted at impossible possibilities like reanimation, zombies or undeath. There was no shortage of the like in fiction, but whatever was happening had a definite sense of reality to it.
Despite the grotesque the physical transformation, his mental capacity seemed unhindered, and he was briefly thankful for that. He also realized he was unusually calm about the situation he was in overall, disrupted only by sudden acute stabs of intense fear. The worst of them were due to the memory of those petrifying eyes, but they were periodically set aside as his focus shifted constantly from one train of thought to another.
Theories began to form in his head, piling up continually like bricks building a wall, obscuring the truth. His greatest wish at that moment was to break down that wall, and he realized that doing that also required accepting whatever truth hid behind it. He opened his eyes to a scene unchanged, hesitantly released his ears and struggled till he sat upright. His attention was rapidly recaptured by the incessant clanging to his rear.
As he turned around, everything began to feel wrong. Colors became wan, the lights in the sky faded away and darkness loomed over a structure in the distance. A single spear of brilliant blue burnt dazzlingly against the dead sky as if it were descending from above into the depths of hell.
Dread took over him again, sending chills up his spine, as he stared at the destination of the blinding light. Even in its premature state, he could recognize the colossus being constructed with such alarming alacrity. The gargantuan walls that would span a good portion of the continent and horrific gates that would vie with the mountains in height were not yet in place, but the core of the structure was in plain sight.
A frozen throne placed regally at the zenith of a platform, rising from the depths of an enormous crater.
He found himself staring in terror at the Icecrown Citadel.