"There are three paths," Nooj informed them as they huddled around the fire. When Gippal had asked where the fire came from, he got the same response as when he asked the same question about his eye, or Nooj's new human limbs. It was just there. "They lead in completely opposite directions, with no real landmarks in sight."

"How are we supposed to know which way to go?" Gippal's teeth chattered slightly as he said this; he really had not been built to handle the cold.

"Maybe each of us is supposed to take a different path," Baralai suggested as he huddled closer to Gippal. Gippal was admittedly very glad for Lai's willingness to share body heat.

"I don't like that idea," Nooj informed them. "Not only is Gippal really weak, but we're in an unfamiliar place. Separating would not be a good idea."

"Plus... this place freaks me out." Gippal nodded and coughed as if to prove his point.

"What do you think happened to us?" Lai's hold on Gippal's shoulders tightened after that cough.

"Maybe we died and went to purgatory," Gippal muttered into Baralai's shoulder.

"Maybe we really were reborn," Nooj said as he pulled his knees to his chest, "like the prophecy said."

Gippal couldn't believe he had just heard that. "When did you start believing in that?"

Nooj regarded him steadily. "Since it gave me my body back."

"Convincing."

"Maybe we should just choose one of the paths," Baralai said almost randomly. "Go down it together and see where it goes."

"Which one, though?" Gippal felt another shiver rock his body. He didn't want to leave the warmth of the fire ever.

"They all look pretty much the same," Nooj said, turning his head and looking at the one nearest to them. "I don't know if there's a difference."

"Maybe we should ask the prophecy sphere," Gippal suggested.

Baralai blinked. "You know... that's a good idea. It came through with us; that must have been for a reason." He pulled out the sphere and looked for the play button, and it projected another message in a low flickering light.

the rightmost path leads to Industria

the leftmost to the hopeless

and the center travels with no companion but the cold

"Industria," Baralai mused. "It's capitalized. It sounds like a city."

"Industry... an advanced city," Nooj added. "At least we'll be able to find out where we are."

"But there aren't any industrial cities left in the world," Gippal said, looking up at the other two as they stood near the entrance to the first path. "The closest thing to an industrial city is Bevelle--"

"Zanarkand," Baralai corrected him gently. "It was a major city a thousand years ago... which is when this sphere is from."

"So," Nooj said, turning and looking down the path. "You're saying that you think we're near Zanarkand?"

"It really would make sense," Baralai replied, following Nooj's gaze. "Gagazet is the coldest place in the world, maybe we're somewhere in the mountains near there."

"But the question is how did we get here?" Gippal hauled himself to his feet as gracefully as he could with his body feeling half-frozen.

"The sphere, obviously," Nooj informed him.

"Hello?" Gippal spread his arms, indicating downward at his body. "Whenever we use that sphere, we turn into animals. Do I look like a monkey??"

The other two looked at him.

"You don't want me to answer that," Nooj finally replied with a very slight hint of a snicker.

Baralai laughed easily, reaching over and taking Gippal by the elbow. "Come on," he said with a smile, letting Gippal lean on him to traverse the knee-deep snow, "once we get to this city, we can get inside someplace warm."

------

------

Gippal sighed as the snow soaked his legs solidly up to his knees for the one-hundred-fifty-sixth time. He had been counting the steps, hoping that by the time he reached a certain number the snow would go away. It had started at fifty, then was bumped up to a hundred. By now it was at two hundred and he wasn't sure how much longer he would be able to go on. The path seemed to stretch on farther than his eye -- eyes -- could see. It was impossible to forsee the end of it.

He could feel the water soaking his feet through the boots and socks that were designed to keep the sand out, not the water. The thick cloth socks he wore were dripping wet with cold water that drizzled between his toes, seeming to freeze his toenails to the point of falling off. He wished his feet would just freeze so he could stop feeling the wetness dripping with every step, the ice cold water sneaking its way up his leg as his socks and pants soaked up more and more snow as it melted around his desert-conditioned body.

It had reached his left knee now. His right knee was still relatively dry, and he wasn't exactly sure how. He loathed the thought of the freezing wetness reaching his thighs and hips and other more important parts.

As he was thinking about how much his situation sucked, he lost track of his feet and his feet lost track of the ground. He fell down and forward toward the snow, stopped from certain doom only by Baralai's arms which closed around him at the last second to save him from what would quite likely have been his death. Well, maybe not, but Gippal would have rather died than have been soaked with ice cold water from head to toe. He hated the cold.

Even the trees were frozen, a thick layer of ice covering them so they glinted silver in the intermittent sunlight. It must have been growing colder the farther they went down the path since the ice layer on the trees grew thicker and thicker until the original bark was no longer visible. The leaves were covered with ice, appearing almost metallic in the shifting shadows. It no longer looked like they were in a forest, but in a field of oddly-scattered metallic pillars.

And it was getting darker.

"I don't like this," Baralai said nervously, looking up at the sky which was being covered by the icy leaves.

"Me either," Gippal agreed, choosing not to look up and focusing only on getting his legs underneath of him. "We should go back."

"We're getting closer to somewhere," Nooj said, rubbing at his formerly-robotic shoulder. "I can feel it."

"Feel it?" Baralai looked down now, and over to Nooj uncertainly.

"Yeah," Nooj replied distractedly. "I can feel something... something warm."

"I think the cold's getting to you," Gippal said under his breath, trying his best to smirk but his lips not wanting to cooperate enough to do it properly.

"No," Nooj answered, turning his eyes back down the path. "We have to keep going."

"Okay," Baralai acquiesced. "Come on Gippal."

------

------

Gippal didn't know what Nooj was talking about. Nothing got warmer. He couldn't feel anything. He still hadn't lost feeling in his feet like he had been hoping for, but he had gotten used to the feeling of icy cold water running down his shins in rivers. He could feel every meandering of the tiny streams of water dripping from the soaked material of his socks from the time they fell at his knees as they ran down his legs collecting water and finally cascaded in something which felt like a waterfall of ice on his ankles. The puddle in his boots spread, freezing his toes, and yet he could still somehow feel every last bit of it. It was depressing and distracting at the same time.

He couldn't figure out why his legs hadn't frozen yet. His skin hadn't dropped to the temperature of the water that cascaded down it, which meant that every little rush of water still sent a shiver down the bone along all the nerves. Gippal had never quite wanted to die before, but this was as close as he had ever gotten.

"A clearing," came Baralai's voice into the darkness which had descended across Gippal's entire world. As the increasingly metallic looking leaves covered more and more of the sky and the ground continued to freeze until they were surrounded by nothing but a matte shine of ice, Gippal's vision had darkened entirely, and eventually it also spread to his hearing so the only thing he could hear was the crunch of ice underneath his feet with every step he took to break through the iced-over snow.

Gippal looked up and blinked his eyes until his vision focused. It was, in fact, a clearing. A wide open circular space laid before them, but it was hardly clear. If anything, there almost seemed to be a haze draped across it, making it impossible to see. The trees and ground were nothing but silver, intermittent light making them flicker like LED lights on a machine. It made Gippal's spine freeze.

The realization hit him as he twitched his toes to shake off the layer of ice that had built up there.

"Industria," he thought he said, but he couldn't hear his own voice. "The trees... turned to machines..."

"Nature... what happened to it?" Baralai's voice sounded desperate, and he closed his hands around Gippal's elbow.

Gippal was all for machinery, but this was just creepy. The trees still looked vaguely tree-like, but they were so thickly coated in ice that they were no longer natural. They were machines... and they had entirely replaced nature. Even the ground. It was all metallic, so thickly coated in ice that there was nothing left of the life that was originally present.

He looked up at the tops of the trees, gazing at them, confused. How had this happened? How had ice and cold turned nature into machine?

Gippal felt motion next to him and he looked over at Baralai, who was now looking behind them, toward the other side of the clearing. "There's no continuation of the path," he said, his voice shaking. "There's no city... this is it."

"What?" Gippal turned around, his eyes tracing the perfect circle of the clearing they were in. There was no continuation. No city. This was Industria...

"Nooj...?"

Baralai's voice rang through the clearing. The realization struck Gippal a second and a half after Baralai's voice stopped echoing. "Nooj... where are you?"

No answer.

"Nooj!" Baralai shouted, his voice reverberating off the metallic trees. "Nooj!!"

"Cred," Gippal muttered, finding his knees shaking uncontrollably. He couldn't tell if it was from fear or cold or an ironic combination of the two. "This... isn't funny Nooj." He paused, turning and shouting back at the path angrily, "Come out you bastard!!"

The only response was Gippal's own voice echoing in an endless circle through the metallic perversion of nature.