I honestly have no idea how much time I spent staring off into the distance, wondering what sort of cosmic joke led me here.
It was strange, really, that I couldn't find it in myself to scream or panic or thrash and kick at nothing. Why? Well, two reasons. One was that I... no longer had a body. And the second one was the fact that, for some odd reason, I just couldn't have a mental breakdown, despite it all. I felt only... a calm and cold detachment, a feeling of complete and absolute serenity.
I knew what I was, what I'd become, but also remembered who I used to be. I knew that, before awakening in this new... state of being, I'd been a student of politics, studying to be a lawyer. But now... I was... something else. There were very few words that I could use to describe the thing that I'd become. The first and most obvious, perhaps, was that I was now incorporeal. But I was... cold. I was winter. I was death – the end of all things. I was ice and snow and entropy. But I was also so much more than that.
Because there were things that I somehow knew that I could do that were, frankly, unnatural. Then again, nothing about this whole thing was remotely close to natural or normal. I shouldn't be here. I should be in my condo, studying for an exam. I blinked and suddenly... I was here – changed.
What am I, exactly? Honestly, even I'm not sure. But my form was now that of a great storm of cold and death, ice and snow. And at the center of my being was a white void so cold that it seemed like the inverse of the heat of the stars themselves, a great frost. What the fuck even happened to me?
I reached out with my non-limbs, now a breath of frost and icy air, freezing the land around me solid – howling gales and thunderous gray clouds. Soon enough, everything around me was covered in ice and snow, blanketing a place that I knew had once been green and verdant. My senses weren't... as they were when I was human. I couldn't just see in one direction, but I saw and felt and perceived every single thing that was touched by ice and snow and wind. The absence of heat became an extension of me, a part of me. And I now encompassed a landmass that was likely larger than the entirety of the United States of America, every frozen lake and river, ever flake of frost, every part of it became me.
What a depressing existence it was to be nothing and everything all at once.
There were... animals here, but I didn't recognize any of them; massive reptilian things with great patches of white fur, frozen solid, and stout, green-skinned humanoids who met a similar fate, their flesh turned cold and hard as rock and stone. Even the plants and the trees made little sense to me. My all-encompassing nature, at least in the land that I was in, told me that this place wasn't any landmass I knew on Earth. The shape was different. Even the shoreline, much of it now frozen in my presence, wasn't anything I knew. Where was I?
I wanted to explore the rest of the planet, but – despite the scale of my being – I actually couldn't move around as easily as I wanted to. I needed an avatar, for instance, to actually be able to interact with the physical world. How did I know that? Not sure. The moment I woke up, I just knew. A strong-enough avatar would allow me to contain the full breadth of the ice and cold that was my true self, granting me the ability to move about without freezing everything within thousands of miles.
Oh, and, with but the barest flicker of thought, I raised all the corpses of once-living animals within range, their eyes – assuming they had any – taking on a blue glow as their frozen bodies stirred. There were millions of them, I realized – approximately 145,457,987 million creatures now under my grasp, moving at my command, their eyes blue and their flesh colder than ice – large and small, deadly and placid, predator and prey. Without an avatar with which to move around with, however, my thralls were incapable of marching beyond the vastness of my being, beyond my presence. For them to be capable of marching beyond, I needed to create loci of control, human infants whose malleable flesh I could turn into something beyond life or death, transforming them into creatures of cold and frost, capable of wielding the tiniest fragments of my power. Aside from my Avatar, these loci, these Others, could act as extensions of my self, able to lead my undead legions for...
For what?
I knew my powers or abilities, whatever they were, and how to use them. But I didn't know what they were for.
I didn't need food or sleep or rest. I didn't need anything. At least, I didn't feel any compulsion to do anything of note. I wasn't a living creature that eventually went hungry from a lack of food and neither was I rotting corpse. I just was. And so there was, quite literally, nothing for me to do. I couldn't talk to other people, either. And I highly doubt a human being could even survive the central portion of me, where the cold was at its coldest, where even molecules and atoms and subatomic particles lost all energy and ceased moving altogether. And, even then, I couldn't exactly communicate as I was, lacking an Avatar.
And every living thing in my vicinity, everything that was blanketed in my frigid winds and ice and snow, was dead – enthralled by my power.
Above me was a rolling storm of bleak gray clouds and a dark sky. I saw beyond it, stars and constellations that I did not recognize, planets and celestial objects that most definitely were not from the solar system that I called home. That I was able to see so far out into the cosmos was fascinating. I wasn't on Earth, but I already knew that.
Still, try as I might, I couldn't move my central point. So, despite the breadth of my being, I was stuck.
I didn't want to be stuck. But, until, something happened to actually change things, then there was nothing I could do. I wish I could've explored the wider world, but a sentient entropic ice storm had few choices in that regard. Oh, I could make my ice storm spread far and wide if I wanted to, blanket the whole planet, even, but that came at the cost of having to sleep for thousands of years afterwards and for what? Eight, maybe ten years of global snow? What for? I'd just be killing the living things I was hoping to communicate with.
More than anything, what I wanted and needed was an Avatar, but until a random infant popped up in my stormy form, then all I could do was wait.
And so I did just that. The one benefit of becoming an incorporeal entity, I suppose, was that I did not go crazy after watching the sun rise and fall for what must've been ten thousand times. The passage of time was meaningless to me, who lay beyond death, beyond mortality. There was... almost nothing on this planet. But in the ten thousand days that I did absolutely fuck all, I did note odd movements from beyond my eternal blizzard, animals and humanoids moving about just outside my reach – cavemen, perhaps? They were definitely people, but they were so far away that I hardly saw them, drifting in and out of sight before disappearing entirely. I suppose that made sense. Ice and snow and eternal night were hardly appealing to living creatures. So, I knew that there were people here, hopefully humans, somehow, in an entirely different planet, and that, more than anything, gave me hope.
Just because I somehow didn't go crazy didn't mean I enjoyed the solitude or preferred it. I'm no social butterfly, but even I grew bored from a lack of human interaction.
Ten thousand bleak and gray days passed, sunset and sunrise and sunset and sunrise, before something finally broke the monotony.
The eternally-stormy skies turned blood-red, churning and raging, twisting and screaming. Odd shapes and swirling limbs and cacophonous echoes surged across the open sky. Phantom faces and laughing figures danced and whirled in the cosmic oddity. The presence I felt was... odd, but powerful. Not like myself. Similar, perhaps, in magnitude, but different. This power was...chaotic. Twisted and malevolent. Another unnatural thing, I decided, much like myself. I stared at the maddening currents of the crimson sea that appeared above the planet, until something came forth, surging through the open air, blazing and red. I slowed down my perception of time and focused on the object. It was a metal capsule, I noted, thick and blocky, mangled. And it was headed straight into the very heart of my being, into the cool void where no life could possibly exist.
Interesting. What was more interesting, I found, was the flicker of life that I felt from within the capsule – an infant.
What was an infant doing inside a capsule? How is it that the sky seemed to spit it right out?
Whatever the case, I couldn't investigate any further as the chaotic mess of crimson colors and twisting shapes and faces on the sky vanished almost as quickly as it appeared. Huh... no idea what the heck that was. The capsule, upon the face of which was the Latin Numeral of the number 11, itself crashed a hundred meters away from my center, close enough for the metal freeze so cold that it simply shattered upon impact, a frozen infant falling right off – not dead, but close to dying. That it lived at all was miraculous.
Almost immediately, I realized that this... thing wasn't at all human. It might've had the appearance of a human infant, but it was... clearly thrice the size of one and possessed a presence, an inner fire that was far greater than what a human should've had.
And that fire was now rapidly fading, flickering away into nothing even as I stretched my perception of the seconds into years. Unnaturally beautiful, I mused, despite its looming death. A single black wing that jutted forth from the right side of its back, curled and cold, the feathers hard as stone and sharp as blades.
This child, I decided, would become my Avatar of ice and frost. I doubt an otherwise normal human infant would do. Though I'd still need the normal ones to turn into my loci, my Others. I reached out with all of my being and gathered the very essence of ice, night, shadow, and death into a single frosty tendril. The infant's eyes snapped open and flashed blue as our essences merged, my entropic emptiness merging with the child's fiery soul to create... something else, a cold fire – a flickering void where no heat could exist, much like my heart, a void where even the very concept of movement was dead.
At last I transferred my very consciousness into the dying child, whose skin and hair were now as pale as freshly fallen snow and whose eyes now shone like glimmering sapphires.
I stood up, staggering in my infant form. I breathed in, but I knew the gesture was futile. This body was both dead and alive, cold and warm. I stretched my limbs and knew that I was strong. Ice and wind and snow and frost responded to my call easily – as though they were extensions of myself. I chuckled as I walked around, glad for the limbs that I now possessed. I touched everything I could get my chubby hands on – the ground, the cold trees, the frozen rivers, even the very air itself.
I called upon my legions of reanimated corpses and commanded them to gather at the center of the frozen storm. I'd call on them if I needed them. I opened my mouth and found that the act of speaking was difficult, but not impossible. "Hello."
The sound of my voice was akin to the cracking and shattering of an iceberg. And the act of speaking and uttering words was enough to release turbulent winds from my lips, freezing cold. Huh, I was gonna have to get used to this.