The wind atop Solania had a voice, a thin keening like glass rubbed at the rim until it wept. It slipped through the ravines and over the torn faces of cliffs, combing the snow with cold fingers, and its chill touched Ludwig before the thought of movement found him. For a long, blunted instant he lay as he had fallen, half-buried in a drift whose crust had hardened while he burned, and the world was only weight and white and a silence loud enough to ring.
He took a breath.
It was nothing at first, habit, an old human reflex that should have been as meaningless to him as blinking is to a statue. Yet the air went in. It went in sharply and cleanly, with the sting of steel drawn from ice-water, and it spread down the throat and out into the emptiness where no lungs had any business answering. The cold filled him. The cold answered.
