People in the courtroom watch the two girls wandering through the cold. Even the Devil herself is watching the event unfold with an indecipherable gaze.

I guess this answers the question of what happened to the young Ms. Donna Day.

Don’t count her out just yet. The Devil made it out okay.

Well, she’s the Devil. Of course, she made it out alright, otherwise we wouldn’t be watching her memory right now.

It’s been a while since Donna has been carrying the Devil and the scene still hasn’t changed. The only difference is … the Devil seems to be getting smaller?

The Devil—or Eleanor is currently delirious. But she is instinctively shedding her weight to conserve energy. She’s throwing away her weapons, her equipment, and even nonessential body parts.

I wouldn’t call arms and legs to be “nonessential.”

Regardless, her body is shrinking, and the load on Donna’s back is getting lighter. Although the girl is too focused on tracking through the snow to notice.

Donna Day walks for hours in the bitter cold. Her limbs are completely numb, and only Eleanor’s senseless mumbling is ensuring her that her companion hasn’t fallen off her back.

“Cold … I want to go to the beach … Mama, my room is too cold … I want to go to the beach …”

“We’ll go to the beach once we get out of here … Just hold on for a while longer, okay?”

“I want to go now! I can’t stand … the cold … Cold …”

“I know, Ms. Eleanor. I know … I can’t stand it either, even though I was born in the far north.” Donna forces out a chuckle. “From where I’m from, it snows ten months out of the year, and summer isn’t exactly warm either. Sometimes … the snow would get so bad, the roads would be cut off and nobody could go in or out of our village … During those times, we had to ration what we had. Sometimes, when the sky is dark and all you can see is gray snow falling as far as the eyes could see, children or old people would doze off and never wake up …”

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

The Devil hugs Donna’s back tightly, feeling any warmth she can.

“Sometimes, when the night was too cold, I would force myself to stay awake. I would sit by the fireplace and watch the flame dancing through the night. It was so pretty I wanted to reach my hand in … One night, a sister caught me sitting by the fire and she asked why I hadn’t gone to sleep. I told her my fears, and she stroked my back and told me my fears were misplaced. Life is but a moment and death is not the end. We live so we may prove our worth in the eyes of God, and those who follow his teachings will forever live in Ceram … Every struggle we go through, every pain and heartbreak we face, are there to test our resolve.”

“Bull … shit …”

Donna laughed. “Maybe … Maybe not …”

Donna falls for a second time. This time, she doesn’t get back up.

The girl lay face down on the snow. On her back is a creature that is either human or animal. The red blob convulses painfully as snow lands on its back.

“Cold … Too cold … Cold …”

The creature searches for shelter. That’s when it feels warmth radiating from the body beneath it.

It turns itself into small tendrils and crawls into the girl’s ear. It digs deep into Donna’s body, where it feels a tinge of warmth remaining in a heart that has stopped beating.

It binds itself to the heart and spreads itself through the girl’s arteries. It digs into her cells, repairing the areas that have been damaged by the cold. It needs the body to be warm again, so it forces the heart to start beating once more.

Thump! Thump! Thump!

“Gasp!”

Donna pries her eyelids open and takes a deep breath. She coughs violently, feeling like something nasty is caught in her throat. Then, slowly, she gets up on her feet.

“Ms. Eleanor … Ms. Eleanor!”

Donna can’t find the girl on her back, so she looks around the white world in panic.

“Ms. Eleanor, where are you?! Answer me! Ms. Eleanor!”

“Shut up! I’m trying to sleep.”

“Ms. Eleanor? Where are you? I can’t see you.”

“I’m right here.”

“Where?”

“I’m inside you.”

“Come again? Ms. Eleanor, please stop messing around and come out. We need to keep moving before we freeze.”

A red tendril creeps out of Donna’s ear and forms a face before her.

“You do that. I’m going to sleep. Wake me up when it’s warm.”

The screen turns black before we can hear the pink-haired girl’s scream.