At some point, the nothing became a blackness, and he became aware that he couldn't see.
This didn't bother him, exactly. He just noticed it. Then he noticed that everything was very quiet, because he couldn't hear anything either. This didn't bother him either. He felt quiet, too, sort of half dreaming and detached and sluggish. It was calm. He couldn't see, he couldn't hear, and he couldn't move, but everything was ok. Pleasant, even. A gentle quiet.
He slowly became aware of...a heaviness, in the middle. In his stomach? No, his chest. There was something clutching and squeezing with a terrible weight in his chest. As soon as he noticed it, he tried to breathe, and found that he couldn't do that, either. He tried to move – and it burned. There was fire wrapping around his body, dragging cold tongues of pain across every inch of him. He had no hands, but he had arms and he wished he didn't because as soon as he noticed them they were burning and stabbing and hurting and then he had legs and a body and a head and there was nothing but the screeching pain and the blackness and the silence -
He breathed, and choked, because his lungs were full of ice.
Water trickled delicately from his nose, dribbled over shrivelled lips. He jerked reflexively, throat cracking free from frost. He tried to gulp, tried to swallow, tried to snatch at air. His chest was heaving with frantic pace in utter silence and blackness, and he didn't understand where or who or what he was but he knew he needed to breathe. He knew abruptly that if he didn't have air he would die and the blackness would become nothing again. No. No.
His arms, still burning, wrenched clumsily from the ice. He was in a chair. He pushed with his new legs, and lurched forward, blind, into more cold. He twisted and scrabbled through his disorientation, hauling himself upwards a short distance on his elbows and knees, feeling instinctively that up was out. And all the time his lungs were heaving into life, sweet, precious air slipping too slowly into his thawing body, coughing out cold water and ice through his gaping, numbed mouth.
He rested there on the floor a while. The pain was excruciating as his body returned to him piece by piece. Blood pumped sluggishly through crystallised veins, and as the ice melted, his breathing returned, hoarse and rasping, but deep and clean. He resumed his upward crawl, slowly and grimly, consumed by an animalistic need to be away, to be out, to be free. In the blackness, he painstakingly navigated upwards, around unknown obstacles. When he could no longer ignore the pain, he rested, and when he could no longer ignore the terror of being trapped, he resumed. When he felt something kind touch his face, he stopped, half-stunned, cataloguing the new sensation. He lay still in the sun's warmth and allowed his mind to be quiet again.