76°00'08.2"S 53°43'31.2"E - Nuevo Trujillo, Spanish Antarctic Colonies
18.05.2024 23:00, UTC+03:00
The sun was shining, as it always did in late May. All you could see was endless white, contrasting with the endless blue of the sky, making your eyes hurt. Or at least it made my eyes hurt, no one else found the Paseo so scary – in fact it was a common place for young couples to meet.
She definitely thinks that’s what we are, a couple. I anticipated her arrival in nervousness, dread even. A slight Antarctic chill breeze hit my exposed face, but I was not sure what was more painful: subzero wind, or the conversation that would follow.
Another breeze. I let myself look towards the icy expanse beyond the Paseo and tried to guess how manic the winds must have been for them to penetrate the domain of Trastamara. According to the weather report, I was dressed in very light spring clothes, not accounting for a slightly exposed Paseo.
A mistake I made, but not just myself, apparently. I spotted Lucia with my peripheral vision, dressed lightly and shivering as she approached me. Her beautiful smile shone ridiculously white and happy the moment she saw me, and I avoided matching her enthusiasm. I waved at her with reserved confidence, hoping she would notice and perhaps get a first warning that I could not match her excitement today.
She started striding faster towards me, completely in ignorance of how unbelievably sexual she looked in the way she dressed and walked. Others looked towards her either lustfully or jealously as she passed by to come over. I blushed looking at her, as her indisputable looks only made this worse.
“Hi-i Ánge-el” she jumped on me and hugged me “Oh I missed you so much”
“Really?” I asked, shocked – we had already been to a restaurant last night. “Was it a day already? I remember our awesome date like it was yesterday” I added trying to sound excited.
I was terrible at this. She laughed.
“You bug,” she pinched my arm “Is it supposed to be cold today?”
“No, should have been fine. This is the Antarctic breeze”
“No way. That’s super cool!” she said and moved a bit closer to the edge of the enormous wall. I followed her unwillingly, holding her by the hand. I was a bit afraid of heights, and there was something uncomfortable about approaching the domain’s border that I could not quite express. Sure, watching the fields of eternal ice outside the walls, while sitting in spring clothes in a city with Spanish weather would be enough to boggle someone’s senses, but there was something more. It was more than a feeling, perhaps a chill I got when approaching the edge, a sense of curious danger, similar to a child approaching an expensive piece of antique china.
“Come on! Breathe Antarctica!” she said and breathed in the frozen breeze.
“That could be dangerous.”
“Sometimes I feel that the wind we are breathing in here is a bit more recycled than the one outside. I absolutely love this,” she answered.
“Okay but just,” I said and handed her a wool jacket I was holding “just cover up a bit at least”
“Aw, cutie” she answered and she took it from my hands. She quickly snuggled and smelled it.
She looked deep into my eyes. I am sure she only had good intentions, but this only exacerbated my awkwardness. Unfortunately, she seemed to always take this as a sign of vulnerability, which was inexplicably a good sign for her.
“Uhm, let’s walk”
The almost-midnight sun was shining bright, only reminding me how much I missed the winter months. Although the climate was controlled by the domain of Trastamara, the sun was not. We were walking holding hands for the past ten minutes, not really talking. She seemed content. I felt tiny bugs crawling inside my skin.
“So, what is your plan for next year?” I started.
“Mmhm. I was thinking about the art major at Pizzaro Residence. I was not really sure, but I have been looking through my grandma’s art over the past weeks and trying to replicate things. It seems like it is in my blood”
“Nice!”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“Plus, I get to stay here in N.T. and get to walk the Paseo with you” she giggled “What about you?”
“Eh, I am thinking of actually going to Europe. Spain or even France?”
She stopped our walk.
“Ángel that is major news,” she said with an indeterminate attitude “How come?”
I shrugged it off.
“Was just thinking I want to see different places you know. High school was a bit much, and maybe there is something actually interesting over there,” I blurted out without thinking about it too much. I noticed her expression change from shock to anger.
“Besides you, of course. You are very interesting. But you know I want to travel now before my studies”
“What the fuck Ángel!”
“Look, Lucia. It is not exactly easy or fair. But in the end, we are only seventeen, and I have been thinking for a while about my priorities. It was fun, but it was always just about the fun for me. And it has been great!” I said to her as fast as I could. Or at least I thought I did, half-way through the sentence, the sun was so bright I had to close my eyes and really focus to get the words out. Cold sweat, shaky hands.
“Ángel, you are not making any sense. Do you need to sit down?” she said getting us towards a bench.
“I—yes I make sense? It might not be easy to accept Lucia but we need to end this” I kept talking but as she sat me on a bench, legs shaking, I started hearing myself speaking and nothing made sense. I was not speaking Spanish, not any other language I recognized for that matter. A family of four next to the bench looked worried at us and the mother of the group turned to Lucia and said something.
The noise was very muffled.
“Lucia. I do not understand” I tried to say, but again I spoke in tongues. She was now clearly talking to me, but I could hardly tell what.
Then I felt it. As if something cracked beneath the palm of my left hand, a ripple of electricity passed through me.
I stood up quickly and grabbed Lucia.
“We have to run,” I said and started running in panic. I could not hear what she said but she started following me.
“— hear me – where are” she yelled at the top of my lungs.
It did not matter. Even if I did not know what I was running from, but I knew we had to reach those… stairs.
Why—
The walls shook as if the earth and wind decided to revolt against gravity. Both of us fell on the floor. Suddenly, my hearing came back. I could hear children screaming and crying. People were looking in shock and wonder. I turned back.
White mist was engulfing the Paseo, starting from where we were in our walk fifteen minutes ago. The mist was quickly expanding on the wall. Due to the distance, it was not easy to estimate its speed.
“Lucia, we need to run,” I said, as the realization rippled through all the civilians currently on the Paseo. We both started sprinting, heading towards the closest stairs.
I wished really really hard that we would be faster than the wave of ice. My mind was having difficulty processing what it was sensing; an unnatural scenery, breaking the rules of physics, in a way only that a cursed origin could. The impossible must have happened: the domain was collapsing, before our very eyes.
“Ángel!” She screamed at the top of her lungs. She usually was a good runner, but her panic did not help. I dared to look behind us and saw the white clouds of ice menacingly enlarging and closing the distance on us. I noticed some people, running like us, being engulfed by it, rendering their screams audible only until the cloud reached them.
These clouds of air were so much lower in temperature than our surroundings, I did not dare fathom what would happen if we were to be engulfed alongside the others.
“Run!” I yelled. We were almost there, at the stairs. Children screaming and a man yelling some names behind us suggested to me that the cloud probably claimed the family that was just beside us, moments before chaos was let loose.
We grabbed each other’s hands and jumped towards the stone stairs. We glided on the floor and quickly tumbled down the stairs. I hugged to protect her as she cried, and I bruised myself all over during the fall. The light of the Antarctic sun dimmed as the white cloud expanded above our heads, turning everything gray.
I closed my eyes, wondering if the icy embrace of the Antarctic would reach us now that we had fallen so far down. Maybe the damage would be limited only on the Paseo, and the cloud would not crawl further into the city. Maybe we were still safe. And as I kept thinking that, and moments passed without feeling anything, I thought we had survived whatever was coming. I mustered the courage and opened my eyes, holding my breath.
Silence, white ice. The cloud was over us. But no cold.
“Lucia, I think we are fine,” I said untucking her from my hug.
Her frozen body tumbled over next to me, and then I heard a haunting sound as if the finest crystal was breaking. Her left side shattered in bloody red pieces under the fragility of her frozen weight.
I jumped back crying her name, not daring to even breathe inside what I assumed was that white mist that had chased us before.
She was dead. A piece of ice shattered in pieces. Then the realization hit: I was not. I was not even cold.
I let myself breathe. You could see particles of water freezing in the air as I breathed out, but it did not hurt when I inhaled.
My head hurt from the psychic intrusion.
“No survivors?” I said out loud, engulfed by white anywhere my eyes could see. “Then what am I?”