NEW YORK — PRESENT DAY
HER SPIRIT TRAVELED FROM THE DEEPEST OF her room to the distant lands of the north. She saw herself flying over an immense, dark sea, dotted with several pieces of ice that swayed from one side to the other, carried by the movement of the waves.
She tried to remember what she was doing in such a distant region, a place where it was impossible for a man to survive due to the tremendous inclementness of the elements, and that was when she realized that she could not even remember her own name, although it did not cause her any inner conflict to discover that she lacked a personality.
The only thing that mattered was to be a witness to what was going to happen.
The wind moaned around her. The sea was churning in high waves, like an immense god of white foam, threatening to flood the planet. In the dim darkness of the night, the pale color of the ice drops now acquired a bluish tone, due to the light that flowed lavishly from the full moon. It was a contrast of extraordinary beauty, in which coherence and disorder merged.
Nothing was real, but everything seemed so authentic, so alive, that even his spirit felt the ethereal and apparent veil of skin that imprisoned his body being lifted. It did not take long for him to realize that he was there for a special reason:
To await the arrival of the ice colossus... It did not wait. The prophecy of the ancients came true, as expected. In the distance, hiding the changing line of the horizon, furiously beaten by the waves of a cold and dark sea, rose the largest and most voluminous iceberg that no one had ever been able to imagine.
It floated on the waters, with its gigantic peaks pointing towards the sky, like the tower of an enormous Gothic cathedral with white pillars. It was drifting, without a fixed course, at the mercy of the ocean current.
It would be useless to try to describe its proportions. Only in the feverish imagination of a madman could a similar nightmare develop.
It was then that, from above, he noticed the shadow that was insinuating itself below the limits that formed the contour of the iceberg. It was the hidden part of the glacial massif, ten times larger than the exposed area. His spirit suddenly found itself thrown downward, crossing the cold mass of water that, now, after undergoing a transformation, seemed placid and yellowish like a desert of sand.
Gregory Evans suddenly felt a deep emptiness in his stomach. The grandeur of the block of ice, submerged in the immensity of the sea, was an unimaginable spectacle, something like being in the presence of God Almighty.
And it was here that the image of that colossus managed to bring him back to reality, waking up with screams of pure terror.