Tree, Nar, Buddy, and Smoke congregated at Tree and Smoke's house to lick their wounds. Bandages decorate Tree's body; burn cream liberally applied around injuries inflicted by Hero's fiery might. Patches of charred bark and wood were hidden beneath the bandages. Tree covered up the bandages with a shiny vest with star-shaped and crescent buttons sewn on. Smoke recovered some of its lost substance from a tub filled with creamy liquid.

Buddy despondently gazed out the window. His formerly silky and shiny fur had turned dull. He had to undergo surgery in order to correct some of his broken implants and exoskeleton. His dented chestplate had to be left alone; it wasn't in the way of any of his organs, and removing it may complicate matters even worse.

Nar was set upon a soft bed of green moss. Many of her bones were painfully broken. Wounds had to be stitched, internal bleeding and bruised organs had to be treated. She was immobilised with an excessive amount of casts and bandages in her bed. An intravenous tube provided fluids and minerals to her debilitated systems. A catheter removed waste fluids from her body.

"So... what now?" Buddy asked.

"Let us settle down and let our bodies heal," Tree answered.

Buddy moved his eyes to Hero who lay in a medical bed, unconscious, possibly dreaming. His left arm was stitched and bandaged. The sword in Tree's hand had inflicted severe damage to the muscles in his upper arms. Patches of wool had to be shaved in order for small wounds to be treated all over his body.

Hero had lost a lot of blood. It was almost enough to starve his brain to unconsciousness. Thankfully, Tree had compatible blood in their medical supplies. Hero had successfully underwent blood transfusion.

"He is a tough one. He will survive."

A knocking sound interrupts them. A large bird comes pecking at one of the windows. Tree opens the stained-glass window to let the bird in.

The bird perched on a chair. It was a simple large seabird with a mailbag. Its feathers were white with light gray accents.

"Package for Nar Q. Rator!" It announced. It produced a virid softbound book. The seriffed title "El Escrip: Acto Dos" was impressed upon its unimpressive cover. The subtitle "libro auténtico de acto segundo del Imaginario" was printed below the title in a small font.

Tree took and placed it on the bedside table by Nar's bed.

"Sign here!" The seabird took out a clipboard. The bird pressed the clipboard close to Nar's face. Nar mumbled a lot of nonsense at the moment. No matter how hard Nar tried, her fingers remained too stiff to do complex and delicate articulation.

"Actually, let me sign it," Tree offered.

"Recipient's signature is required!"

"The recipient is currently unable. As her acting guardian, I am representative of her will."

The seabird continued to be stubborn. "No. The signature must come from the recipient's hand, paw, tentacle, or other miscellaneous object manipulating limb!"

Tree sighed. They placed a pen in Nar's hand and pressed the clipboard onto the pen's tip, creating a scribble in the appropriate area. "There. Signature of the recipient from the recipient's own hand. Is this sufficient?"

The seabird reviewed the entry and simply smiled. "Yes. I am happy with this transaction!" It then began to flap its wings and take off its perch and fly out the opened window.

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Tree went to the backroom to procure a board and a bookstand. They placed it on Nar's bed. The book was then laid open before Nar in such a way that she could read it while laying in bedrest. The book was flipped to a page that bore "Capitulo Veinticuatro".

~***~

Menthol dreamt. He found himself in a camp. Cabins made of timber stood around him. Fresh snow covered the landscape in a thin carpet. Green grass poked spears from the ground. The sun shone soft warm light. Conifers grew beyond the perimeter of the camp like proud towers. The sky was as clear as it could be, the clearest Menthol had seen it for a decade; the first sky he ever seen that wasn't storming. Better yet, he didn't feel cold.

It put Menthol in a good mood. He decided to look around. In the center of the camp was a fire pit that housed whitish flames. It was odd, but he dismissed it.

What was odder though was the odd absence of people.

Menthol wandered into the cabins, but found just as oddly empty. There was an odd amount of silver and marble. Just about everything that wasn't wood was made from silver or marble. Silver lanterns with the same whitish flames lit each cabin.

A silver mirror in one cabin made him turn. In the mirror, he saw an unfamiliar reflection. A pale skeletal man stood beyond the glass barrier of reality and reflection. Glowing aquamarine eyes inset the eyesockets of a malnourished jackal's head stared back at him. Gray fur matted his body, wilting leaves decorated his back, head, and shoulders.

He reached out to the mirror, and the man in the mirror reached out to him. He flinched. He could scarcely believe the topless man in the mirror is his reflection. He pressed his fingers onto the glass; bony fingers met bony fingers.

Even in his dreams, it haunted him. His cursed body, barely clinging to life, appeared time and time again. The more he stared at the mirror, the world seemed to get colder and colder and colder and colder...

Until frost began to coat every surface. Bluish white painted every wall. The frost crept from the frame of the mirror until it completely coated the reflective surface. A cursed rune wrote itself on the face of the mirror, the rune that had cursed him for years in his failure. Hagalaz. The merciless biting cold. The hard and emotionless blizzard. The wasting of all things that is warm and soft.

Menthol staggered. The cold crept up his veins. He turned to the closet where he found a familiar blue parka. He wore it and ran.

Frosted firs blurred past him as he sought to run as fast as he could away from the camp. The white flames that once danced in the center of the camp laid still like snow shaped into the likeness of fire. A spiral of dark clouds sullied the clear skies.

As he ran farther and farther, the world grew darker and colder. Strange rectangular formations made of marble protruded from the ground. Slabs of cold silver began to litter the ground. Instead of green needles, the trees now bore needles made of ice which carpetted the ground and crunched beneath his feet. The cold pierced into his body like a screw: slow, methodical and unstoppable.

He ran until he could run no longer, running up to a wall of roaring winds. The frozen winds ripped at everything that passed through. Menthol turned around only to find himself completely surrounded on all sides by unsparing windy walls.

Menthol hazarded a hand into the blizzard. The wind ripped his hand to shreds, leaving behind a frozen stump. He could only stare at the remains of his hand in horror.

Menthol dropped to his knees. Tears flowed out his eyes. Hopelessness filled his insides like a slowly freezing liquid. Cold flowed through his body like blood. The walls of deathly winds inched closer and closer towards him. The light faded slowly, dipping him into pitch darkness.

The courage that he once wielded had long eroded away. The fierce passion that he held against Prometheus in his glory days had long been extinguished. After years of irremovable cold, the person who led his city in battle had degraded into the pathetic person he was now.

Instead of empowering his fellows to victory, he now brought them low with cold. His name cursed, his heroic identity erased from everyone's memory. He could only reawaken some of the instincts and discipline that was locked to the back of his people's minds.

Menthol dropped to the ground in fetal position. He profusely shed tears. He cried for his failures to his race, his inadequacies made manifest by his curse, his wife who expected his letters, and his first child who never got the chance to be born with his memory.

His body felt like ice, thoroughly frozen. He was ready for oblivion. He had shed the tears that had amassed inside him for a long time. He faced the cold end with no more tears to shed but too much jobs left unfinished, but it was enough; he had done enough. He could do no more.

He closed his eyes to embrace the darkness and cold, to let it take and consume him.

Only for him to instinctively belch as he felt fluid flow into his airways.