When Gilgamel stepped in, the blizzard was gone.
The air no longer burned his lungs with frost, nor did the snow claw at his skin. Instead, he found himself standing beneath a sky painted in warm sunlight. The ground breathed with life: soft grass beneath his boots, wildflowers nodding lazily in the breeze, and butterflies drifting like fragments of color torn from a painter's brush.
Before him spread a lake so calm it mirrored the heavens, its surface broken only by the occasional ripple of fish gliding beneath. Willows bent gracefully toward the water, their leaves whispering in a rhythm both soothing and strange. Birds sang in the distance, their notes harmonizing with the murmur of water and wind.
It was an impossible contrast. He had been trudging through the frozen death of Eversnow, and now he stood in a place utterly untouched by cold—a sanctuary torn from another reality.
