It was an expanse.
As far and the eye could see and farther than the mind could comprehend stretched the blank, white canvas. Shimmering in the harsh, unforgiving sunlight, a desert made of ice claimed what one could only assume to be the entirety of the land. No hills or fissures marred it's surface, no cliffs, nor drops, nor even dips in its utterly flat stretch. The sky was cloudless, but not a warm shade of blue. The colour was strange and unfamiliar, the sort that would teeter the line of normality and reason for someone more used to the clear blue of a summer's sky back home.
She was not one to judge the world by comparison. She had learned long ago that there was no point. The colour of the sky was the colour of the sky, uncanny or otherwise.
There is beauty in the unfamiliar.
Each breath she took felt straining, constructing her lungs. The cold was a knife to her senses, rousing her from what felt like a perpetual sort of daze, permeating and all encompassing. The bright blankness of the expanse seated itself into her vision the longer she observed, forcing light into her retinas until it became almost meaningless whether her eyes were open or closed; there was nothing but white either way.She found herself turning in circles to try and discern a difference.
Nothing altered itself, no matter the direction she looked. She quickly realized that she had no idea where she had begun her spin; each pace was identical. Beneath her feet were the fruit of her labours--nothing more than crushed snow. There was a hard surface beneath it, the powder only covering the expanse with a few centimetres of disgise.
When she placed her hand to the ground, a deeper cold than even the air seeped through the skin. Below the thin layer of frozen dust lay an eerily smooth sheet of ice. How it could have become so smooth, what could have frozen such a large place as this, were questions unanswerable.
In the end, it didn't matter much anyway.
She walked until she could no longer see where she had arrived, where the snow was unmarred save for the single trail of footsteps behind her. She walked until she was no longer able, until it was no longer needed, before she let herself fall to the surface of the ice. Facing towards the unchanging horizon, away from the imperfections she had left behind her, she crumpled to the ground and took in the frozen world with rapture.
Hours passed. Days. Perhaps years. Perhaps only a few long minutes.
She could no longer feel herself laying there. Her limbs had become immovable, whether they had fused to the icy surface of were simply too cold to feel. The white expanse began to creep into her sight, tunneling the sky into nothing more than a sliver of that muddled blue.
It did not matter to her. She was only here to observe.
The cold was in her lungs, rattling every breath she drew. Fewer now. Shallower. She could feel her heartbeat slowing the longer she lay.
To observe.
There was a brief moment
Then the white overtook her vision.
YOU ARE READING
A Martyrs Respite
Povídky"We're allowed to love ourselves, and we're allowed to hate us for it."