The sun had long since departed. Standing on the edge of the cliffs of Corone, Shinsou gazed up at the night sky; the progression and position of the stars in the sky telling him that sunset had been roughly three hours ago.

Civilization was several miles behind him, but its noise and light were ever present as he turned to see an oily smudge of orange across the sheet of star-studded black. It marked the position of the settlement he couldn’t remember the name of. Who lived there? What was that place? The Telgradian found a tall oak and sat with his back pressed against the rough bark, the fabric of his new coat managing to soften the pressing, rough texture of the wood enough that he was beginning to nod off. The query faded into the night. Shinsou’s legs were folded loosely before him, and his hands rested atop them, gently cooled by the night air. For the time being, Osiris thrust away the nagging questions that should have kept him wide awake, until at once he collapsed.

Moments later, he opened his eyes.

The forces that governed his dreams saw fit to lift him up across miles of rolling Coronian lands to deliver him to a strange field. The dirt seemed settled, but no grass grew upon its soil.

Shinsou rose to his feet and blinked slowly, rubbing the bleariness from his eyes with the heel of his hand. The night air, colder than before, stung at his flesh as the wind picked up with sudden ferocity, its gentle playfulness from the day forgotten, now only bringing howls and moans to his ears as it rushed across the countryside. From the murky blackness, a woman seemed to simply materialize, her back to him, her red hair familiar. As she turned, her face was blurry and out of focus, like a poorly taken photograph. His expression shifted subtly; eyes opening a degree wider than before, his jaw muscles flexed - and nothing.

"Do you remember me?”

Suddenly, pain bloomed, accompanied with the taste of blood in his mouth. Thick, fat rivulets of it dribbled down his chin to splatter on his feet and the ground. The girl’s foggy image motioned to him. Her eyes were gone. Instead, her open eyelids showed empty sockets staring into a greater hell than he could imagine. The fingers of her left hand were slick bone in the moonlight, and the flesh was peeled way up to the elbow, where sticky red muscle shone. Her body stopped, just above her waist. A few inches of ropey intestine lay limply in the dirt.

“Do you remember me?!”

The question tore at his soul. Shinsou couldn’t remember her name, her face, or her form. A tornado of crimson and white suddenly tore into the wall of his dream, and as white noise replaced the words of the spectre and the ambience of this false plane of existence, he awoke from this hellish dreamscape to the bright glow of reality.

A painful reality.

Pure, blinding white made his eyes recoil horribly. That pain lingered for a moment before fading, and drawing in a deep breath, Shinsou slowly regained consciousness. A flutter of his eyelids accompanied a cold, burning sensation that overpowered his left cheek.

Snow.

Black threads still flickered at the edges of Shinsou’s vision, but the disorientation was beginning to ebb. The scenery was horizontal, as was he. His pain receptors were going into overdrive; throbbing from almost every part of his body thumping electrical warnings into his head. Clean sunlight poured over him, the light gleaming off a polished patch of ice ahead. The breast of his shirt was stained, sticky, and damp. His hair was pasted to his skull with a mixture of snow and ice, and it hung limply into his face. Blood was smeared in three wide patches on the flesh of his left hand; it was speckled in the white powder too, in tiny drops, just beneath the bottom of his hand. As he clawed his right hand forward and tried to pull himself up, sliding his right knee forward, a shooting pain jolted up his calves, through his ribcage and into his head. The sensation forced his muscles to fail, sending him crashing back into the chilling white. His laboured breath hit the cold Salvic air and turned to clouds of steam with increasing tempo.

Something flickered between the curtains of frozen hair; catching his eye for just a second, but he was back at ground level before the thought could try to escape from his mind. It was a person. Dark spots stained the human’s crimson robed form.

"Where…am I?" He whispered before the darkness dragged him back into the void of sleep once again.