The first thing Cherion felt wasn't the cold. It was the silence.
The quiet was… wrong. Not peaceful, not calming, just weirdly aggressive about it. Like the North had muted itself and nobody knew why.
He groaned, and wow, his own voice sounded like something dying in a rusty pipe. His eyes felt glued shut with ice, and when he finally pried them open, the world looked like a glitchy grey-and-white mess.
I should be dead. Yep. That was the first thought that showed up, calm and unhelpful like a bad notification.
He lay there for a heartbeat, waiting for the agony to arrive. He braced for the whole "everything inside me is broken" experience, crunchy ribs, screaming leg, the works. But it didn't come. There was a dull, thrumming ache radiating from his spine to his skull, a "fell-down-the-stairs" kind of hurt, but he was, miraculously, in one piece.
"How?" he croaked, and wow, his voice was not doing him any favors
