Chapter 201: A Loneliness Beyond Cold
W-where am I?
The thought surfaced sluggishly, like a bubble rising through tar. My vision swam, the world a bleached smear of white.
Snow?
No, it was too bright, too empty to be simple snow.
Hmm?
Then I remembered everything:
- The Shroud’s maw yawning wide, the chilling plunge into its core.
- Lantern’s Glim, Shared Burden, and Mender’s Paradox working in tandem, the Crescent Mirror’s Mirror Reversal effect channeling through its very essence.
- Every power, every last drop of aura, had been poured into that single, desperate gambit.
I’m not dead, am I?
A knot of unease tightened in my gut. I tried to reach out, to summon the familiar, comforting screen of the System.
No ’ding’, no holographic prompt, nothing.
Just the vast, unsettling silence of this strange void.
Thrummm.
Then, the oppressive white began to waver, softening at its edges.
It thinned, revealing spectral hints of jagged peaks and swirling, ceaseless blizzards beyond. The formless expanse gave way, flickering, to vast mountains, perpetually cloaked in snow, battered by a howling wind I could almost feel.
My hands clenched around nothing.
This isn’t right.
The plan had been meticulous: allow the Shroud to ensnare me, let it believe victory was absolute, even guide it to drag me into its very core. The Exorcist’s Eye had already been awakening when the world tilted sideways.
I clearly remember its purifying light building behind my eyes, a moment away from deployment, my focus absolute, but then, my consciousness swayed violently. And then...
Then... I was here.
...Ok, let’s calm down and assess the situation.
I looked around, or rather, I simply saw . My vision wasn’t restricted to forward, or even peripheral. It was a full, unsettling 360-degree panorama, as if I possessed eyes on every surface, perceiving all at once.
Am I a bird or what?
The thought was strange, yet the sensation itself, this boundless perception, was oddly comfortable, utterly native to this new ’body’ I was in.
Then time began to warp.
The scene around me, the endless, desolate blizzard, flickered.
Days bled into weeks, weeks into seasons, seasons into years.
The same cycles repeated - white and wind, stark and silent.
The same process, a brief jolt of awareness, an unchanging landscape, repeated itself, over and over.
A cold certainty settled in my mind.
I wasn’t dead at all.
I was probably experiencing the Shroud’s past. Its memories, laid bare before me, raw and unfiltered.
It seemed this thing, this entity of ice and mist, was born as a natural phenomenon within the blizzard itself, a nascent pure aura beast coalescing from the raw energies of this frozen waste.
At its beginning, it was just... a watcher. Unable to move, unable to interact, a newborn observer in a world of endless white.
And, years passed like blurs.
The formless entity began to stir, a slow, deliberate expansion. It gained agency, drifting and swirling freely with the blizzard, a living part of the driving mist.
Another dozen years or so blurred past like flicked pages.
Then, a shift.
Through the swirling snow, I saw them: the first new lifeforms.
Strange creatures, beasts with bodies that vaguely resembled the skeletal structures of long-dead prey, moving with an eerie, silent grace through the snow. They were the first flicker of ’sentience’ in this desolate world, beyond the nascent Shroud itself.
And then, another new sight, looming out of the white: the Eclipse Keep.
My breath hitched. I recognized it instantly, the jagged silhouette of its spires and walls a familiar horror.
I felt a primal urge from the Shroud’s perspective, a nascent attempt to reach out, to speak to these new creatures.
But there were no vocal cords, no language, only a formless desire.
Through that invisible connection, I felt it: a profound loneliness, a vast, empty boredom stretching across an existence that had known nothing but endless white.
But as more time blurred, the boredom shifted.
A dawning awareness bloomed: it had strange powers. Powers it was only just beginning to comprehend.
It all happened in a simple and coincidental way.
The snow was howling around it, a blizzard raging. A human, cloaked and bent against the wind, stumbled directly through the formless mist.
For a fractured instant, a kaleidoscope of alien images, sounds, and emotions surged through the Shroud’s nascent awareness: a flickering fire(hearth), the warmth of a distant laugh, the scent of cooked meat - a glimpse of a human’s memories.
I watched, fascinated, as the Shroud finally found its reprieve from the endless boredom.
The fleeting contacts became more frequent, more intentional.
It would drift near the Keep during every blizzard, drawn by the faint echoes of life and thought that bled through the stone.
It was learning, testing the boundaries of its strange new senses.
As I witnessed its tentative forays, the scattered pieces of the puzzle began to click into place in my mind.
The old records of Ashenfang Whitefall always spoke of the Keep’s early years as uneventful, but later chronicles mentioned a disturbing phenomenon: people caught in the blizzards reporting vivid hallucinations.
A crucial detail, one that had always bothered me, now stood out in stark relief: the records clearly stated there were no casualties from these strange occurrences. No one was ever harmed by these phantom sights and sounds.
Now, seeing the Shroud in its nascent state, experimenting with its evolving senses and powers, the truth became clear.
While it sought to understand the memories of the Keep’s inhabitants, it had, unknowingly, unleashed another of its nascent abilities - illusions.
The creatures of ice and mist, the comforting warmth of a non-existent hearth, the loved ones seen through the storm – they were all the unintentional side effects of the Shroud’s attempts to connect, to alleviate its profound loneliness.
The early hallucinations weren’t malicious; they were simply an unrefined manifestation of its illusionary power.
But this unwitting power soon led to its harsh discovery through an unfortunate incident.
One day, during a particularly fierce blizzard, the Shroud drifted too close to a lone figure, a young woman huddled against a crumbling wall.
Driven by that familiar, yearning desire for connection, it reached out, focusing all its nascent energy on projecting a vision of warmth, of comfort, of what it perceived as ’home’ from her own memories.
Instead, she crumpled.
A low, keening cry tore from her throat, swallowed by the wind. Her hands clawed at the snow as if trying to bury herself in it. The Shroud pulsed in confusion, its mist coiling tight.
Why wasn’t she comforted?
Then I saw what she saw.