Cael ran, and ran, and ran. Tears flew behind him as horrific images played through his memory on endless repeat, his parents' deaths, the burning train engulfed in flames, that eyeless soldier's haunting smile. He kept running desperately, as if he could somehow outrun it all as long as he never stopped moving forward through the deep snow.
But alas, eventually the exhaustion of everything that had happened finally caught up to him. As his legs began to give out beneath him, he tripped on the snow that was only getting deeper with each step and fell face-first onto the frozen ground. After hitting the snow hard, he thought about getting up, about continuing to run. 'I need to keep moving!' he thought frantically. 'I have to keep moving!' he urged himself desperately.
But mercifully, darkness forced its way through his vision and the overwhelming exhaustion caught up to him at last, finally claiming his consciousness.
Hours passed as he lay motionless in the snow, and he dreamed, dreamed of what had happened, of that man's eyeless face, of his mother's face as she pleaded with him to run, to live. And one final word was left echoing with him in his dream, repeating through his head over and over as morning light began to flood the winter landscape.
"Live."
His eyes snapped open suddenly as a desperate breath forced its way through his lungs. He gasped for air, forcing himself up to his hands and knees in a panic, his body trembling from the effort. It took several long moments for him to center himself and calm his racing heart, but once he did, he began to remember. Remember what had happened. Remember his current situation. And soon after, remember his pain, both his physical pain and his deep mental anguish.
He sat there on his hands and knees, staring down at the snow below him that was stained dark with his dried blood, for a long while before steeling himself and slowly rising to his feet. Suddenly, a cold determination began to settle across the boy's face as he managed to stand upright despite his injuries.
He looked down at his hands, covered in dried blood and snow, when he noticed something strange and impossible. "I don't feel cold," he said aloud to himself, his voice hoarse and confused. He should be freezing to death having fallen asleep exposed in the snow. Actually, he should already be dead from the cold alone, not to mention his burns and wounds. But he wasn't dead. In fact, he wasn't cold at all. His body felt perfectly comfortable despite the killing temperature around him.
He thought for a moment before remembering the moment with that soldier back at the train, the one who had killed his mother. When he had somehow controlled the ice without understanding how.
"Maybe it has to do with my gift," he muttered to himself.
He continued to look at his hands with newfound curiosity before slowly raising one upward in front of his face and focusing intently on it, attempting to recreate what he had done earlier during that desperate moment. He focused as much as he could on the palm of his hand, trying to forcefully create ice, thinking intensely about ice, about ice forming in front of his outstretched hand.
He began to squint with concentration as he attempted to squeeze out ice through sheer willpower alone. After several tense moments, he finally began to see something happen. Cold particles, almost like tiny snowflakes, began to circulate wildly around the front of his hand, swirling in beautiful patterns. His eyes opened wide with amazement as these snowflakes began to coalesce into something solid.
A rough, ridged ball of ice began to form, slowly growing larger and larger until it was about the size of his palm. But then suddenly, without warning, it shattered into countless fragments that fell to the snow below.
Cael looked down in shock and disappointment, turning his hand toward his face to examine it closely. "What happened?" he wondered aloud.
He thought for a moment before sighing deeply, his breath creating a small cloud in the frigid air. 'I guess it will take some practice,' he thought to himself with resignation before looking ahead at the endless white landscape stretching before him.
'Ice powers though, huh? I thought that was impossible… only Eve herself has those powers according to everything I've been taught. So why me? Why would I be given something so rare?' he thought questioningly, his brow furrowing.
He stood in silence for many long moments, pondering why he had been gifted with such an incredibly rare and supposedly impossible power. The wind howled around him, but he felt nothing.
'Huh, no matter. There's no use thinking about a question I can't get the answer to right now,' he decided, steeling his gaze forward with renewed purpose. 'All I know is that one day I'll master this power of mine completely… and I'll get my revenge.'
His lip curled with anger as he began to walk forward through the snow, leaving footprints behind him. 'I don't know exactly why we were attacked. I don't know what the true motive was behind it all. But what I do know is that dome soldiers only do what they're told, nothing more and nothing less. They follow orders without question. And they are never told to do anything that isn't what Eve or the higher-ups want them to do. Never.'
His steps pressed into the snow with more and more force as his fists clenched together tightly at his sides, his knuckles turning white. 'So for one reason or another that I don't understand yet… Eve wanted my parents dead. The goddess we worshipped, the one we devoted everything to, ordered their execution.'
The realization fueled his anger, transforming his grief into something harder, sharper. 'And with a power like this, a power that supposedly only she possesses, I can do it. I can get my revenge for what was taken from me. Or I can die trying. But either way, that is what I'll live for now. That will be my purpose.'
He turned all of his overwhelming sadness, all of his devastating grief, all of it into pure anger, into a concrete reason to live, into fuel for revenge. Because if he didn't, he knew the sadness would consume him entirely and he would not manage to go on living at all. His young mind couldn't handle that much pain without something to focus it into.
So hatred, cold, burning hatred was all he could manage to live for now. It was the only thing keeping him moving forward through the snow, the only thing preventing him from lying back down and letting the wasteland claim him.
And so Cael Vandrel walked on into the frozen wilderness, alone but alive, broken but determined, with nothing left but his impossible power and his desire for vengeance against the goddess herself.