The silence here does not merely exist. It weighs. A glacial, compact mass that crushes even the most fleeting thoughts. Not a breath. Not a crack. Nothing but this white cotton, thick with several inches, that has buried the world under a shroud so perfect that one would swear life itself has deserted the place for centuries.
Yet dawn is breaking.
A first light, timid as a confession, brushes the tops of the fir trees. It glides over the powder snow without a sound, without even marking the surface, a simple pale golden caress on a funeral sheet. The cold, however, does not relent. It bites, stings the nostrils with each inhalation, that dry burn which heralds frostbite before one even notices. But on the cheek, where the sun deigns to rest, a tiny warmth is born. Paradoxical. Almost indecent in this kingdom of ice.
Yet the snow lives. It turns blue in the shadow of the conifers, pinkens on the exposed ridges, adorns itself with cold pastels that no brush could capture. A subtle gradient, a palette of colors that exist only for themselves, in the absolute indifference of this world without witnesses.
Everything is suspended. Frozen. As if the air itself were holding its breath, awaiting some unknown event, some unknown profanation of this immaculate perfection.
---
It was first a spot. A dark tear in the whiteness, so small that one could have mistaken it for a stray shadow, an insignificant imperfection. But as the sun climbed, detailing the landscape with its raking light, the spot took shape.
Human.
A tiny silhouette, lying half-buried, which the snow had nearly finished absorbing into its silence.
It was a young man. His skin, a warm and deep brown, clashed with the surrounding whiteness, screaming its difference, its absurdity in these places. He was lying on his stomach, but his body had tried to move—one could see it in the churned snow around him, in the furrows dug by fingers that had clawed the ground without finding anything to cling to. His short, kinky hair, bristling with frost, resembled a crown of icy thorns. His face? Almost entirely buried. Only a temple and the lobe of an ear emerged, purplish, already bitten by the frost with that cruel indifference that only nature can show.
He wore a simple black t-shirt. Faded jeans, soaked, stiffening in places. The absurdity of this attire was glaring, such an obvious denial of the elementary laws of this environment that it became almost obscene. As if this man had arrived from another world, another season, another reality.
Suddenly, his lungs emptied.
Not an exhalation, no. A spasm. A brutal convulsion that half-raised him, as if someone had plunged a dagger between his ribs. The icy air rushed into his throat, tearing, and he gasped, seeking oxygen with the frenzy of a drowning man.
His eyes opened.
They rolled, darted in all directions, unable to fix, to find a landmark, an clue, anything resembling the familiar in this white void. They expressed pure panic, the kind that precedes thought, that short-circuits all analysis. Animal panic, visceral, of prey waking in the predator's maw.
Then his entire body tensed.
A violent shudder of cold coursed through him, a painful wave that contracted every muscle, every fiber. The survival reflex—that ancient software buried deep in the reptilian brain—took over from the panic. He curled up, instinctively drawing his knees to his chest, rubbing his bare arms with clumsy, desperate vigor. With each exhalation, thick plumes of vapor escaped his mouth and nostrils, condensing instantly in the polar air—proof that his body was still burning what it could, wasting its last calories fighting the inevitable.
"Where... where am I?!"
His voice came out hoarse, broken, like old leather cracked by frost. The cold and fear had scraped it raw.
He tried to stand. His movements were uncoordinated, limbs numb, heavy as lead. He felt that deep burn where his skin touched the snow, that insidious bite that stole sensation, that anesthetized to better destroy. Under his fingers sinking in to push himself up, under his palms seeking support, the powder was not damp, not soft. It was a burn of cold, a dry and persistent pain that climbed up his forearms, chilling him to the bone.
It took him an infinite time to stand. An eternity. As if he had to relearn every gesture, every muscle contraction, every balance. His soaked clothes weighed a ton on his body racked by uncontrollable shivers. His black sneakers, completely frozen, crunched on the snow. He could no longer feel his toes—they were absent, gone, as if they had never existed.
"How did I get here?!"
This time, his voice tore through the silence. But it swallowed it immediately, devoured it without even an echo, as if the landscape refused to acknowledge his presence, to grant him the slightest importance.
He looked around.
The immaculate landscape stretched as far as the eye could see. A beauty of deadly coldness. Calm. Too calm. A calm that was not peace, but pure and simple absence. Not a bird. Not an insect. Not a trace of life. Nothing but him, lost facing the silent trees and the colossal mountains that rose like indifferent giants, too busy contemplating eternity to notice this shivering ant at their feet.
His gaze shattered. Not just because of the cold stinging his eyes and making them water. But because of that thing drilling into his mind, that question looping obsessively, unbearably.
How?
HOW?
Just moments ago—or perhaps hours, he had no sense of time anymore—he was sleeping. Peacefully. In his bed. Far from the cold. Far from this snow that burned his skin. The idea brushed his mind: what if it was a dream? A nightmare too real, too absurd to be anything but a construct of his unconscious?
A strange, trembling smile slowly stretched his chapped lips. A smile that had nothing happy about it.
"Why... why does it feel so real? I'm not dreaming, am I? I'M NOT DREAMING?!"
The laugh that escaped him wasn't really one. It was a broken, dry sound, somewhere between a sob and the onset of madness—that little tune that starts nibbling at the edges of consciousness when reality becomes too heavy to bear.
He advanced.
Without thinking. Thinking was too painful, too exhausting. He had to move. He had to find shelter. It didn't matter if it was real or not—he had to escape this glacial pain gnawing at his bones, methodically nibbling every part of his body.
One step.
Another.
Each movement was torment. Not because he carried a weight—no. Because his strength evaporated with each stride, like water slipping through fingers, like sand in an hourglass that couldn't be turned. His brown skin, moments earlier still warm with life, now turned ashen gray, that dying pallor that emergency workers know too well. He shivered nonstop, shaken by uncontrollable spasms—a dead leaf clinging to its branch in the last gusts of wind, on the verge of letting go.
His feet. He could barely feel them anymore. Each step was an estimate, an attempt, a gamble with balance. He advanced.
---
An hour? Two? Three?
He didn't know. Time had ceased to exist, replaced by this single certainty: advance. The landscape didn't change. Always these trees, always this snow, always this abyssal silence that seemed to feed on his thoughts to make them thicker, heavier, as if frozen inside his skull.
He was talking to himself now. An incoherent murmur, a dialogue with ghosts only he could see. Snatches of phrases, encouragements he gave himself, questions without answers that bounced off the walls of his empty mind.
"Just a little more... one more step... can't stop... if I stop, I..."
But his legs were no longer legs. They were two pillars of pain, two blocks of ice advancing by pure reflex, by that absurd stubbornness that only living creatures possess. He fell. Got up. Fell again. Each fall was harder, each rise a battle against the urge—almost sweet, almost tempting—to stay there, to close his eyes, to let the cold take him at last.
And always that question. Turning, turning, turning like a scratched record in his broken head.
How did I get here?
How?
How...
---
It was first a spot. A dark tear in the whiteness of the mountain flank. A spot that, as he blinked to clear the white veil obscuring his vision, took shape.
A cave.
Small, yes. A simple cavity in the gray, porous rock. But big enough for him. Big enough to rest. Big enough to sleep.
Hope—that thing he thought he'd lost hours ago—tore through his chest with unexpected violence. He rushed forward, or at least tried to, his legs refusing to obey the speed he demanded. He fell twice before reaching the entrance, crawled the last meters, his frozen fingers clawing the snow, the stone, anything to bring him closer to this refuge.
His hand touched the rock.
Cold, of course. But less than the snow. Less than the air. And when his torso entered the cave's opening, he felt something he'd forgotten for an eternity.
Warmth.
Not a frank warmth, not that of a fire or a living body. A relative softness, barely a few degrees warmer than outside. But for him, for his hypothermic body, for his skin that had known only the bite of frost since waking, it was like plunging into a scalding bath.
Yet he hesitated. A fraction of a second. The cave's darkness was dense, impenetrable. What hid inside? A wild beast? A hibernating bear, ready to defend its lair? An even stranger creature, born of this world of ice and silence?
But the other option, outside, was death. Slow, certain, implacable.
"Damn it!"
The curse escaped his chapped lips like a final surge of rebellion. He pushed himself inside without thinking, without giving his brain time to list the dangers, without listening to that reasonable little voice whispering to stay cautious.
The warmth enveloped him.
It was soft. Tender, almost. Like a blanket draped over frozen shoulders, like a warm hand on a cold cheek. The warmth penetrated his soaked clothes, reached his skin, slid along his contracted muscles, and for the first time since waking, his shivers eased a little. Just a little. Just enough for his bones to stop vibrating, his teeth to stop chattering.
He collapsed at the cave's entrance, straddling two worlds. His head turned inward, toward this warmth that drew him like a moth to the flame. His legs still exposed to the glacial air, as if part of him refused to surrender completely.
His eyelids grew heavy. The fight to keep them open was brief, lost in advance. The last image to strike his retina was the cave's darkness, deep, impenetrable, perhaps filled with dangers he wouldn't have the strength to face.
But for now, in this precise moment, he was warm.
Or at least, he was less cold.
And in that moment, it was enough for him.