Alatar, after long and serious consideration, finally resolved to touch the blue light. His hand hovered for a moment, trembling between dread and resolve. Curiosity burned hotter than fear, and so he pressed his fingers to the glow. The instant his skin met its surface, the world betrayed him. It was not a simple touch, not a ripple or spark—it was a devouring. The light folded inward, swallowing his arm, his body, and at last his very breath, dragging him down into a place beyond comprehension. There was no sensation of falling, only a suffocating stillness, as if the light had been waiting all along to claim him.
It was not a pull, nor a fall, but a sudden, inescapable consuming, as though the light itself were a living mouth that had been waiting for him all along.
When Alatar opened his eyes, the world around him had changed. He stood in a land of eternal frost, a realm imprisoned by ice, a frozen realm where snow fell in endless silence. Drifting ceaselessly from a sky the color of ash, each flake cutting the air like frozen dust.
Beneath his feet lay an endless shroud of snow and ice, an unbroken, unyielding sheet that stretched to the horizon and buried the world in a deep, silent pallor. In the distance, jagged mountains loomed, their peaks crowned with glittering, frozen glass that fractured the pale light into a cruel spray of splinters, scattering it like shards of broken glass.
Between them yawned gorges—black and fathomless chasms breathing a cold so profound it sank into bone and marrow, their depths unknowable and suffused with menace.
The silence pressed in on him. No rustle of life, no sound of water, no echo of birdsong. Only the hollow whisper of snow falling upon snow. The air burned with cold, every breath stabbing at his chest, each exhalation curling away like smoke from a dying fire.
It was a place stripped bare of warmth, a land where even memory felt brittle. An eerie desolation stretched all around him, and though Alatar had never set foot here before, he felt as though the place remembered him, as though the frost itself was aware of his trespass.
A shiver worked down his spine. The cold alone could not explain it—there was weight here, a pressure like unseen eyes resting on him. He turned, scanning the endless veil of white, but saw nothing. Still, the sensation remained, heavier with every passing heartbeat.
The wind shifted, carrying with it a sound almost too faint to notice, yet impossible to ignore—a low groan that echoed from somewhere far within the mountains. It was not the voice of wind nor stone. It was something alive.
Alatar's hands clenched at his sides. His mind wrestled between retreat and stillness, but there was no way back—the light was gone. Only the frozen world remained. With each drifting flake of snow, with every hollow sigh of the wind, he knew: this place was not empty. Something slept here. Something vast, and patient, and cold.
One thing Alatar had failed to notice was that, in this strange space, he was not a soul drifting in half-existence. No—he was fully formed, flesh and spirit bound together, and in truth he appeared more striking than he ever had in life upon Earth.
His body was slender yet powerfully toned, each line and contour unnaturally perfect, as though sculpted with an artist's precision. There was a symmetry to him that defied chance, a refinement that no mortal lineage could claim.
His eyes were black pools flecked with molten gold, and now—curiously—veined with faint threads of icy blue, perhaps the residue of the souls he had drawn into himself. They seemed to burn with an inner depth, at once alluring and unnerving, as though secrets too heavy for language lingered behind them.
His skin gleamed with a deep, rich brown hue, but it was no longer unmarred; faint ash-gray markings ran along his arms, shoulders, and chest like subtle etchings of smoke and shadow.
They did not appear painted nor scarred, but living symbols, moving almost imperceptibly with the rise and fall of his breath. These marks seemed to hum with a quiet power, as if they were not mere ornamentation, but a script written by forces beyond comprehension.
He stood tall—nearly six feet five—a towering figure whose presence commanded attention. His posture alone radiated authority, though he made no effort to impose it. There was a regality about him, a dignity that suggested not simply rebirth, but coronation. His form was not merely human anymore; it was elevated, perfected, as if carved by the hands of gods themselves.
This was Alatar now—no longer the man who had walked the soil of Earth, but something other, something reborn in power and mystery.