Traces Of A Broken Crystal - [Twibra]

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D A W N   O F   C O N F U S I O N

. . .

The cold was the first thing that came.

An icy pang in his flesh, a chill that penetrated to the bone. Then, the pain. Dull, persistent, spreading through his body like extinguished embers beneath the snow.

Waking up wasn't a sudden act. It was more like a slow torture. A return that dragged him back to consciousness, as if his mind refused to acknowledge that he was there, as if his body already knew that waking meant suffering.

Everything was blurry; obfuscated images and distorted sounds played in his mind, seeming to fight each other to find their place in the puzzle of his memories.

Sombra blinked against the haze clouding his mind, and all he could see was white. White above, white below, white in every direction.

An empty, cruel wasteland that, to his misfortune, he easily recognized.

What was he doing there?

How long had he been there?

Who exactly was he?

The jumble in his memory couldn't answer his questions.

The cold wasn't the worst of it.

It was the silence.

Not the soft, reassuring silence of the night or an abandoned library, but another kind of silence, the kind that emerged when life was nonexistent.

It felt as if the entire world had stopped and forgotten he existed. As if sounds had decided not to bother reaching him.

All he heard was the fiercely roaring wind, dancing around him as if waiting for him to burst from the cave and take him away.

Suddenly, his sense of touch returned... and how he wished it hadn't.

Ice clung to his skin like living claws. Every inch of his body ached, as if it had been fractured inside and out. A searing burn pierced his ribs with every breath. His fur was soaked, frozen. His mane, matted against his face, caked with snow and something that had once been liquid, now dried and hardened, which he deduced was blood.

And finally, he opened his eyes fully.

The light was too white. Too intense, and it was made worse by reflecting off the snow.

The sky was a gray mass above him, with snow falling like ash. A rough stone ceiling covered in a thick layer of ice hung over his head: a cave. Small. Fragile. Barely deep enough to protect him from the storm outside.

He swallowed, but his throat was dry, cut by the icy air, which made breathing a hundred times more difficult. He could already feel the pain starting to throb at the side of his head.

His breathing accelerated almost instinctively as his brain registered the situation: he was very likely to die if he didn't find shelter, warmth, and food soon.

Nevertheless, even though his mind was a jumble of moving images that still had no connection to each other, he was sure of one thing: he would not die there. And not like this. Not without first fighting to live, not without even knowing who he was and what had brought him there.

He tried to move a hoof, but it wouldn't rise. What he achieved was barely a spasm. Try as he might, his muscles wouldn't respond.

He stopped, resigned. He shifted his attention to something else.

He closed his eyes, focusing on his shaky breathing and trying to ignore the overwhelming noise his scattered memories were making.

It hurt to inhale. It hurt to think. But he had to start somewhere.