Snow drifted in endless silence.
The boy opened his eyes to a white sky, heavy and still, the flakes tumbling like ash upon his lashes. He lay in a meadow shrouded by frost, every blade of grass trapped in crystalline glass. For a moment he did not move. The world itself seemed to wait with him.
His breath fogged faintly in the air. He touched his lips, his chest, his hands. All of it felt real. Warm. Alive. Though no memory explained how he had come to be here, the question barely lingered. The hush of snow wrapped around him, and the strangeness softened into something almost dreamlike.
He rose, unsteady at first, then steadier. The snow crunched beneath his feet, sound swallowed instantly by the vast expanse. He turned in a circle, searching for something — anything — that could tether him to meaning.
Then he saw her.
A girl stood at the edge of the meadow, her figure slight against the pale horizon. Snow caught in her dark hair, strands glinting as though woven from frost. She watched him with eyes bright as lantern glass, and when she smiled, the cold seemed to loosen its grip on the world.
"You woke," she said softly, voice carried by the hush of falling snow.
The boy blinked, startled. "Was I… asleep?"
She tilted her head, as though considering the answer herself. Then she laughed lightly — not mocking, but like the first sound the meadow had heard in centuries. "Perhaps. But you're here now. That's what matters."
He stepped toward her, slow, cautious, yet drawn by something undeniable. "Do you… know me?"
Her gaze softened, and she offered her hand as though the question itself was unnecessary. "I was waiting."
His hand slipped into hers. Her palm was warm, startlingly warm against the cold. He clung to that heat, and in that moment, without knowing why, he believed her. Believed that she had always been there, waiting for him to awaken.
Together, they walked into the snowfall.
The meadow stretched into endless whiteness, the horizon fading into nothing. Yet with her beside him, the emptiness no longer frightened him. Each step left prints that the snow quickly blurred, as though the world itself resisted permanence.
Still, she laughed as they went, pointing to icicles hanging like glass daggers from skeletal branches, to frozen ponds where the surface shimmered with a mirror's perfection. She tugged his hand, spun him clumsily in circles until they both toppled into the drifts, breathless with laughter.
When he looked at her, cheeks flushed from cold, her smile radiant, something inside him ached. He could not name it, but it felt like the beginning of everything.
Snow fell heavier, muffling all sound but their laughter, until the world seemed built for only the two of them.
For the first time, the boy thought: I am alive.