Because I Love You✔️

Chapter 39: Lost in the Syl Mountains

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Lost in the Syl Mountains

It was cold.

Xaphile's eyes slowly opened and he sneezed, shivering violently.

Beneath his cheek lay what felt like snow... but, that wouldn't make any sense, considering it had been around late spring time not even an hour ago.

Unless... he'd died again.

The thought had him sitting up in shock and confusion flooded through him when he looked at his elongated claws, then peered around at his snow-covered tail.

Sure enough, he was still a bizarre-looking cat-devil-creature thing.

He sat there for a moment, feeling oddly numb... but then, reality smacked into him with a bang.

And the most real part about it was the cold.

It drove beneath his clothes, worming into the gap between the edges of his cheeks and the rim of his thin hood. He could feel it pouring like water into the tops of his boots and saturating his socks, flowing up his loose-hanging sleeves to penetrate his bare skin, permeating his dark cotton pantaloons at the waistband and then worming its way into the boxer-like shorts he wore beneath them.

Even though the cold was so intense that it seemed to settle into the marrow of his bones like so much liquid cement, making his joints lock up and shudder as they tried to shake themselves back into limberness, he realized that there was no wind, probably because he was surrounded by a dense pine forest.

The trees were huge, with trunks of burnished silver that he couldn't have wrapped his arms around even if there had been two of him to share that task.

Their branches wove together in a tapestry of green so thick that it was impossible to see the sky.

His entire world was filtered with a dingy green light, doubtless one made by the trees interacting with the ambient light above the forest.

As he looked around, subconsciously trying to burrow deep into his clothes, he noticed that it was actually snowing despite the lack of sky above.

His brow furrowed: snow was falling in gentle eddies of powder-fine ice, piling up at the bases of the trees around him in small drifts, coating his shoulders with small white patches that drifted away when he moved. It seemed impossible for there to be snow in this environment without a sky.

But there it was... when he looked up, the snow came roaring down like an avalanche.

He was unexpectedly buried under a heavy snowfall as the pine branches let it all go.

"FUCK!" he squealed, shoulders locking up and tail snapping out like a washboard. "COLD!!"

When the vertical avalanche was over, barely transparent clouds of effervescent silver swirled up by the thin needles that sprouted from the trees.

With every exhale, breath misted before his face, forming a cloud, and as he watched, a small portion of snow formed from the mists of his spent breath.

Shocked, he watched as it dusted his shoes with what looked like powdered sugar.

"It's so cold that water vapor freezes?" he whispered, not believing his eyes. "What the fuck? Where am I?"

There was no answer: nothing but silence... not even the whisper of forest animals.

Shivering violently, Xaphile regained his wits and finally stood up.

Jamming his hands into his armpits, he started walking aimlessly, footsteps sticking with hollow whumphs against the cushion of snow beneath his feet.