The cold was absolute, creeping up his boots and binding his ankles to the soil while the dry scrape of ceramic dragging across dirt grew louder. Scritch. Scritch.
They were less than three feet away now. In the dark, the glowing red and dull-white pinpricks cast a sickening hue across the nearest gnome's face. Its painted cheeks were cracked like dried riverbeds, its pointed red hat chipped at the brim, its jaw hung open in a frozen, silent laugh. Behind it, dozens more pressed forward in a tightening ring—a tide of hollow eyes and wide, empty grins.
His body refused to move. The sheer density of the Fold was trying to flatten his thoughts, attempting to force his mind to match the static zero-state of the statues.
In the suffocating silence of his mind, he tried to seize upon the stinging memory of slapping himself on the beach. He tried to force a count. A beat. A rhythm.
One.
He pushed his consciousness against the void, trying to force a single second to hold still.
Nothing happened.
The gnomes kept creeping closer. A ceramic hand, cold and rough as sandpaper, brushed against his ankle. Panic spiked through him, shattering his fragile concentration. The moment his focus slipped, a blinding headache slammed behind his eyes—a punishing recoil from trying to bend a realm that refused to be bent. Blood began to drip from his left nostril.
It's not working.
Desperation replaced logic. He couldn't command the scene. He couldn't wave his hands and make it vanish. The Fold was an ocean of chaotic time, and he was nothing.
Scritch.
Another statue lunged, its cracked porcelain fingers closing around his knee. The petrifying cold of its touch began to numb his leg instantly, creeping toward his hip.
He didn't try to master the space. He didn't try to destroy it. In sheer, raw terror, he slammed his own forehead forward, smashing his skull directly into the face of the nearest ceramic gnome.
CRACK.
Pain exploded through his head, sharp and blinding. Vision flashed white, and the agonizing sting of fractured bone and torn skin jolted his nervous system into pure, chaotic shock.
It wasn't a calculated "time anchor." It was a violent, brutal shock to his own consciousness.
The gnome's head shattered under the impact, but the scene didn't collapse into light. Instead, the sudden, violent spike in his brain chemistry sent a erratic glitch through the local space. The ground beneath him didn't break cleanly; it tore open in a jagged, uneven rupture, swallowing him whole.
As he tumbled backward into the dark, the remaining gnomes snapped their hands into the void where he had just been standing, their hollow laughter echoing above him.
He plummeted down through the dark, clutching his bleeding forehead, dizzy, nauseous, and deeply shaken. He hadn't mastered the Fold. He had barely survived it by inflicting raw pain on himself, and his head was spinning so violently he could barely remember his own two-letter handle.
The darkness around him began to thin, dropping his battered body toward whatever unpredictable, dangerous coordinate came next...