Day 4: B-Side

20: Cryogenesis

The deep howl of a roaring wind woke Fret. He tried to push himself upwards, but found that when he attempted to remove himself from the ground something tugged and tore at his flesh. As his vision became gradually less disorientated, he realised why. His body rested on a thick sheet of dark ice, glued to its freezing grasp. His cheek was firmly planted on the ground, his eyes only able to absorb part of his surroundings. Not that there was much to take in. All he could behold in his limited field of view was a great white wasteland, a vast desert of frigid nothingness. The horizon was white, fogged up by a maelstrom of snow being whipped into a frenzy by the dancing, arctic wind. The ice he rested on constituted the entirety of the ground of this fantastical, inhospitable realm, stretching off into that bleak horizon and mingling with it, creating a solid line of light and dark where they met. Fret did not know why he was here. It didn't feel like a dream, the painful sensation of being tethered by skin to the ice beneath him certainly felt real enough. But it had to be. He hadn't left Shibuya and been ditched in the arctic. At least, not to his awareness. So, it being a dream, he reasoned that he would just lay there until he succumbed to the cold. If he died here, he would be shocked awake in reality, right? And so Fret closed his eyes, focused on the chattering of his teeth and how numb yet painful everything felt, and willed himself to die.

After a few minutes of gradually feeling every bit of himself stop feeling in agony, Fret began to feel overwhelmingly hot. Feverish, almost. His arms and legs were completely gone by now, all pretence of them ever being able to move again abandoned. He began to feel dazed and delirious, confused but on the edge of euphoria. He began to laugh, his voice echoing out to eternity but drowned out by the wind. He tried to collect himself, but nothing could bring him back from the quickly approaching brink. The heat in his body continued to spike, almost unbearable now, an inferno raging in his skull, causing his pulse, now slowing, to hammer against it as if it was trying to break free of his own head. His eyelids, which he had thought frozen in place, began to slowly shut. Then he began to dream, and terror entered his slowly stopping heart. Was this not a dream? What he experienced in the brief moments before death were indescribable – a Shibuya made of empty lightning-blue triangles, its geometry polygonal and wondrous, something so familiar yet alien, a wireframe metropolis a few thin lines away from an all-consuming void; a great tree wrapped around the 104 building, sturdy, ancient roots constricting it and a single fruit ripening from its lofty branches; one-thousand concentric circles he fell through at meteoric speeds, his bones shattering and reforming, his body breaking itself in two and then mending itself every time it hit the next ring, and at its centre his friends, beings of pure light, waiting to receive him; and then nothing. Blackness. A space deeper than the darkest night, so devoid of anything resembling light that to even call it a void, he felt, would not do it justice, that to say it was 'black' would be an insult to its impossible hues of nothingness. Slowly, it began to collapse. Fret did not know how he knew it was collapsing, but it was, crumbling away around him until all was still. As this happened, his dead body lay still on the ground of the vast plain of bleak crystal.

The deep howl of a roaring wind woke Fret. He tried to push himself upwards, but found that when he attempted to remove himself from the ground something tugged and tore at his flesh. Ice. This would hurt, but it was necessary. He pushed upwards, tearing strips of flesh from the lower parts of his legs, arm and cheek that were exposed to the elements. He could feel the gelid surface furiously tear away the flesh from his face and as he staggered to his feet, he looked down and beheld the strips of his body now permanently plastered to the ground beneath him. He was bleeding where it was exposed, sure, but that blood quickly froze and just left everywhere that was being battered by the wind excruciatingly raw. He took in his surroundings. Bleak. Wherever the hell he was, it seemed the only was out was to stumble blindly around like a rat in a maze until he could find something, anything, that could get him out of this mess. It was a dream. If it was a dream then he could just lie down, wait for death, and then wake up. But he didn't feel like doing that. It was a dream, right? Why didn't it feel that way? He kept asking these questions as he trudged onwards across the white plane, taking large and purposive steps so as not to slip on the ice and subject himself to any more pain. He was not dressed for the occasion, his already numb extremities having trouble lifting his scarf around his nose and mouth. His choker was beginning to burrow into his neck and, deciding to save himself the irritation, he ripped it off and watched the wind carry it away into the fog. Immediately the flesh it had covered up began to burn in the flurry. He cursed into his scarf and continued onwards, the same two questions repeating themselves in his head.

Eventually, after what felt like hours but was probably no longer than thirty minutes, something appeared on the horizon. A misshapen mound of… something. Better than literally nothing, Fret thought, and he increased his pace towards it. Narrowly avoiding slipping once or twice, the horizon finally broke to reveal just what that form was. It was… him. Long since dead, preserved by the cold. He could make out the same exposed flesh from when he had risen from the glacial floor, the same pulled-up scarf, but there was no light in his eyes. This Fret, this him, had probably wandered until he couldn't any longer and died, alone and in despair. This dream was not severed by death. How many more bodies were out there, he wondered? What expression was on their face as they died? What emotion was preserved in death? Rage? Resignation? Hope? He sank to his knees as he began to feel himself be hollowed-out. Every part of his brain that had told him to walk to survive shut up, consumed by the black hole that expanded outwards from his stomach. He didn't know what to feel. He felt nothing. He lay back down on the ice and listened to the storm raging in his ears. There were a million other sounds he would rather die in the presence of. A good song. The sounds of the city at night. The voice of someone he loved. But this gale, this goddamned wind was his death knell. From the stretch of time from when he had woken to now it was the only thing bar his ragged breath and chattering teeth had he been allowed to hear. And so he yelled. Yelled in wretched anger. Bellowed in defiance of that all-consuming wind. Fret grabbed the corpse next to him and hugged it close, crying into its frozen neck. He continued to hold on and weep stunted, muted sobs until his lungs let out their last gasp.

The deep howl of a roaring wind woke Fret. He tried to push himself upwards, but found that when he attempted to remove himself from the ground something tugged and tore at his flesh, but he ignored it, quickly rising to his feet. He realised what a mistake that was when the snowstorm began to spit daggers into the now exposed flesh the ice had claimed. He looked around at the nothingness that was the landscape and began to feel panic set in. He tried calling the names of those close to him into the fog but, predictably, no-one answered. His legs shaking more due to emotion than cold, Fret slipped and felt a dull pain crash into his lower body as it collided with the ground. He clutched his head in his hands and screamed. He would have to die to wake up, sit down and wait for the cold to eat away at him. He was almost prepared to do so, but some irrational part of his mind screamed at him that this was not a good idea. It almost felt like a million Frets started yelling at him when he thought that way. He also considered wandering around until he reached some sort of landmark – maybe a settlement or a border to whatever the hell this place was – but again those invasive voices his mind was channelling seemed to scream at him not to. He stared down into the depths beneath the ice, and fury welled within him, springing forth from resignation. He hammered a fist against it. Just once, at first. But then he struck the ice a second time. And a third in quick succession. And then a fourth and fifth quicker still. And he kept striking the ice beneath him over and over again, a flurry of fists fuelled by the fire in his head, by the anger behind his eyes. It was excruciating. Eventually, not even the sub-zero temperatures of the world around him could stop hot blood from spraying from his damaged fists. He could feel the muscle and sinew of his hands get chipped away as the ice did, slowly degrading as his hands became less human and more of a bloody pulp. Eventually, when it seemed all but bone would be left, he raised his hands above his head, channelling all that rage and frustration into one almighty blow. His hands collided with the ice and the sheet gave way, shattering instantly into pieces.

A brief moment of confusion followed, but when Fret opened his eyes he was underwater. Everything was so much clearer here. The fog had lifted, sunlight streamed down from above and it was inexplicably warm. It was as vast as the world that had shattered above, and as Fret beheld the depths with striking clarity, he could make out other forms that had fallen into this ocean with him. They were himselves, sinking slowly to the bottom of the fathomless depths, unable to swim upwards for they had long since died. The comfort of the unusually warm water washed over Fret, for a while, until he realised he would have to surface for air. He stared upwards, only to find the sheet of ice had reformed. His eyes widened and he willed his legs to move upwards, thrashing his way to the re-crystallised layer above him. He considered hammering away at it, but recoiled when his damaged hands touched the surface and unknowable amounts of electric pain coursed through them. All Fret could do was watch the sun shine through the ice above him as he began to feel his body become starved of oxygen, as his lungs began to ache and scream. All he could do was think about how he had trapped himself down here as his vision became dark around the edges and blurry everywhere else and his heartbeat was felt in his fingers, head, lungs and eyes. He took stock of what felt like spasms in his chest as every part of him begged for air that he could not breathe, and silently prayed that the next Fret to wake up on the ice would make it through, impossible as it seemed. Then, a crash. A rush of bubbles and a dull thud. Something grabbed onto his arm with an iron vice-grip and heaved upwards. Though murky, his vision could make out another misshapen and bloodied hand, the hot red pooling into the deep blue of the water as it rose upwards, taking him with it.

When Fret hit the surface once more, he was aware that the ground beneath him was not ice, but something more industrial feeling – asphalt? Concrete? He did not care. His body savoured how coarse and warm it felt against his cheek. His body was splayed out on the ground, his hands were wrecks, battered and destroyed, and he barely felt close to alive. But he was still breathing. The wind was gone. He could hear his own breaths, and thoughts, and wondered just how he had survived unable to do so.

"You seemed to have survived quite the ordeal," a feminine voice rang out from above him.

"…tell me about it." He said, limiting his words so he could catch precious breath. "Thanks… thanks for the assist." He closed his eyes and drank in the sun-baked warmth of the harsh ground beneath him.

"I would not have helped had you not been worth saving," a hand, mangled as blood-stained as his, reached down to offer him support getting up, "Lord Tosai." Fret grasped the hand of his saviour and felt that sharp jolt of pain ring through his bones. He instinctively knew she felt it too. He lifted himself upwards, his weight supported by the figure before him, the part of his hand that was still intact wrapped around what felt like a glove, or what remained of one. He brushed himself off, trying to ignore the agony-fuelled nausea in his gut and stood to meet the other person's eyes. They did not let go of each others' hands, their arms a bridge between one another, clasped and meeting in the centre. They let their burning blood mingle, let their pain intertwine, let their eyes drink in the other's presence, let their grasp tighten and their breathing synchronise, and as the pavement beneath them became dotted red with the mixture of their experience in that long and wicked dream, Fret awoke.