Blackness. An ominous, looming form of nothing. Time seemed to stretch and bend, of no importance. In this blackness Herbert floated, aware only subconsciously, before a razor blade of white cut across the horizon.

The cold hit Herbert like a punch in the gut, blasting the breath from his lungs, forcing him bolt upright. As he opened his eyes, a fantastic light blinded him, punching him back to ground. His head struck something hard and he moaned in pain. White specks danced under his closed eyelids. Each breath racked his body as he tried desperately to suck air back, his chest rising and falling heavily.

Eventually the pain stopped pulsing through his body. The concussion was no longer nauseating, but there was a dull throb emanating from the back of his skull. His breathing returned to normal. Carefully this time, Herbert cracked open his eyes, just a slither: white. For a moment, Herbert thought this is what blindness must be like, and he poisoned his eyes with invisible fumes. However, even through the lashes of his eyes, he could see graduations in the white, and other colours entirely. The revelation came as a short relief, and Herbert was rather sure he’d prefer blindness. Rising up from the blanket of white and challenging the sky before him was a tower of dark grey stone, each brick large and rough, eroded over the years. Flames had sprung up sporadically along its length, juxtaposed clearly against the frost-entombed bricks on other portions.  

Herbert was aware of the choking feeling swelling in his chest and rising up his throat. Fear. He tried pushing himself into a sitting position, to which his muscles protested, but obeyed. It wasn’t clear whether the cold was the cause, or their disuse, which worried Herbert. He was vaguely aware of a dampness at the back of his head, sitting his hair to his scalp. He touched it tenderly and brought his fingertips to his eyes. No red, which was good. 

Herbert dared open his eyelids a little more, and after a sharp ache, they adjusted. The grog over Herbert’s mind was beginning to clear. The ebony and ivory landscape was not his basement; it was very far from it. Dark stone jutted from the even snowfall, and Herbert followed the bridge from the tower to a large keep, terrible and black against the murky, opalescent sky.

“Liza, where am I?” he breathed, and mixture of ignorance, awe, and trepidation somewhat keeping him level-headed about the whole situation. Further off he could see another pillar, the bridge of this one long since collapsed under the barrage of the dismal weather.  

His back was soaked; he could feel it chilling in the winds, howling as the crested peaks, whistling under the bridge. Turning, it became apparent he had been lying in a pool of water in a mottled depression of slate. Behind him was a huge fire. It did not seemed to be sustained by any fuel, but burnt hot enough to unveil a ring of rock from beneath the snow. He probably had that to accredit his lack of freezing to death. He approached the fire, unnatural and bright, and hot, mercifully hot. Folding his arms, Herbert stood close enough to feel its heat, as he tried to recollect his last few hours, and work out what to do next. A foul smell floated into his nostrils, putrid and greasy, and familiar. At the centre of the flame, which he gazed into, with a mind elsewhere, were the silhouettes of charred bones, misshapen by the dancing flames into something vile. Herbert shivered, and not from the cold. He felt he knees give, and he slumped, cradling his head by the fire, trying to gather his thoughts and take the initiative. 

The fire was unearthly, abnormal in its incandescence and perpetual life, and whatever foul hell spawn created it could easily still be lurking. Once he was dry and at much less of a risk of meeting an early, frozen tomb, he would move. His brain seemed to be handling it well, as though it had quarantined of the section that dealt with sense and sanity. A godsend, as Herbert had little left.