THE TOPIC OF THIS CONTEST WAS:
Her ankle betrayed her and she again found herself face down on the frozen pond. Two strong arms picked her up, and carried her toward the woods. Oddly, she wasn’t afraid. In a clearing ahead stood a stone house with smoke puffing from the chimney. He pushed open the door, and carried her inside, where she was shocked to see three…
(Stories need only touch on this topic in some way to qualify.)
Sink, sink deep. The freezing cold welcomes you in its embrace. The pond doesn’t judge; it is content pulling you deeper into the blackness. The frigid water bites at toes, ankles, legs. A thousand blades made of ice slice through your flesh, separating skin from muscles. You should scream; you don’t. Nerves have fallen asleep; the cut is registered as distant, irrelevant information.
Water fills your lungs. There, beneath the pond at the top of the abandoned hill, an icy grave claims you at last. You got the end you wished for.
Yet death won’t come. A strong hand pierces the darkness, grips your shoulder and drags you upwards with an irresistible force. You breach the surface, are welcomed back by the blue light of the moon and the frozen trees.
Gentle arms carry you. It is a strong being with an imposing presence, yet eyes cannot make out who or what they are for their shape is ever-changing. Man, woman, beast, an idea, it is everything and nothing at the same time.
The hill is silent save for the sound of crunching snow and the regular plop of blood dripping onto the white blanket. Your blood, as it tends to happen when one is missing the necessary skin to keep it all inside.
Away from the pond, they gently help you stand on your own. You take a short look at your own flesh. Red, leaking, dangling nerves and the occasional organ. Yet on this hill, pain and exhaustion are no issue.
Leaving a trail of crimson in your wake, you walk to a small, wooden cabin, and the realization hits.
“I’m walking to my death.”
“You all are,” your companion replies calmly. “What matters is to keep walking and meet it with your head held high.”
They open the door. Fire crackles in the hearth, lighting up a white, heavy marble door, out of place in the cramped room. Before the fire, your peeled-off skin.
“It’s all over, then,” you say.
“In a way.”
They put their open palm on your bleeding, pulsing chest. There’s a crack, and your trunk splits open.
A flood courses in you, through you, tearing at your innards, your brain, your muscles. A tempest rips apart what you are, who you are, to the last molecule, to the last thought. You become dust, and dust is broken down in turn.
An eternity later, consciousness returns. You feel hard floor against the back of your head, and raise a hand to your face only to realize your skin is back, renewed, unblemished. A terrible smell assails your nostrils; it stems from a pile of gore and other substances best left unspoken.
“What is this?” you ask.
“Everything you were a minute ago, little lamb,” the companion replies as if it was obvious. “Apologies for the odour, I cannot be held responsible for the fact you humans are, at the very core, made of excrements.”
They delicately drape the pile of flesh with your old skin, trail the contour of the absurd mass with a finger. With a nod, they begin to knead, press, bend and shape the living material as if it was clay. From bones and fat, a candle is born. And with a snap of the fingers, it’s alight.
“So… I’m not dead?”
“Obviously.” They carry your candle to the marble door.
“Who are you?”
“Too many things to count. A good host, I would hope. A destination. But I like to consider myself a collector first.”
The door swings open, and a cold very different from the chill of death hits.
You are looking into the vast void of space, lit by a million stars.
“Why won’t you kill me? It’s all I ever wished for.”
“I could claim your life,” the companion says, covering the candle’s flame with a hand. The air is stuck in your throat; your lungs turn to clay. “But why would I?” The hand is gone, oxygen returns. “I collect, little lamb, but what I like to collect most are stories. And you’ve yet to live a proper one.”
They offer your candle to the void. It slowly drifts away, free from the shackles of gravity or logic, until it becomes a small blink of light a world away, one star among many others.
“But I have nothing left,” you say.
“Really?”
They close the marble door, and go to open the normal, wooden one to the outside, to the abandoned hill and its frozen trees; the falling snow is gradually covering the bloody tracks.
“The night sky, the rustling of the branches under the wind, this is somewhere to be. And this,” they add as they point at you, “with all the pain that comes with it, is someone to be. Now off you go.”
Before you can blink, you’re outside, no cabin in sight, no warmth to ward off the winter and protect you from shivers. Before you, the lights of the civilization you tried to leave behind.
A voice resonates from deep within the night.
Come back you when you have a story worth dying for.
Arms crossed around the chest; you take a tentative first step back to the world of the living.
