Kain woke with a start, his body jolting as if pulled from a nightmare. His lungs burned as he gasped for air, trying to get the horrifying sensation of them filling up with gritty sand making him unable to breathe.
The first thing he noticed was the cold—a biting, relentless cold that seeped into his bones and made his teeth chatter. His breath came out in visible puffs, crystallizing in the air before dissipating into the white void around him.
He was lying on a hard, icy surface, his body half-buried in snow. The world around him was a stark, blinding white, the kind of white that seemed to stretch endlessly in every direction. The sky above was a pale, featureless gray, and the ground beneath him was a frozen wasteland, dotted with jagged ice structures that jutted out like broken teeth. The silence was deafening, broken only by the occasional howl of the wind as it whipped through the icy landscape.
