Chapter Zero: The Fall and the Mark
(Before the road existed, before the cold was created)
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In a room with no walls, the walls themselves were. An entity of light and echo. His name was Sion, or at least that's what the voice that came from nowhere called him.
"The journey is not a punishment. It is a cure."
Those were the last words of the executioner-physician. Then, the floor opened beneath his feet. He did not fall through air, but through layers of time, like the pages of a book burning one after another. He saw the face of a woman without features shedding tears of crystal. He saw a city with towers twisting in on themselves like stone intestines. He felt the heat of an explosion before he was born, and the cold of a grave before he died.
Then the fall ended.
He awoke on a rough floor. His body was naked, save for a coarse cloth wrapped around his waist. The air was heavy, carrying the smell of salt, rust, and ancient dampness. He looked around. He was in an abandoned shed, or perhaps a ship's hold that had run aground. Faint light seeped through cracks in the rotten wood.
He felt his face with his hands. It was smooth, beardless, unscarred. But something was not right. He stood up unsteadily and approached a stagnant puddle in a corner. The water was almost black, but clear enough to see a reflection.
In the center of his forehead, drawn in a faint blue color like a subdermal tattoo, was the Mark: a circle, with an inverted triangle at its heart. A memory pierced him like a nail. It had not been there before the fall. Or... had it always been there?
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The next three days were not of this world. They were a fog of hunger, fear, and the sound of footsteps outside the cracked wood. At night, the creatures came. Not creatures of claws and fangs, but creatures of shadow and sound. They whispered his name, they extended watery arms to reach for him. The Mark on his forehead protected him. It glowed whenever they approached, and the shadow would retreat with a muffled shriek.
On the fourth day, he found the bag.
It was lying at the threshold of the abandoned shed, as if someone had left it for him. Thick black leather, seemingly ancient yet unworn. Inside: heavy clothes of coarse wool, shoes with thick soles, provisions for two days—dry bread, hard cheese, and a water skin. Nothing else. No weapon. No maps. No money.
But in the bag's inner pocket, there was the one thing that had not been merely left: it had been placed there. The pendant. A cold metal disc, the size of a palm, hung on a chain of the same dull metal. On its surface, inscriptions he did not understand. Not letters, but curves and intersections resembling maps of burned cities.
When his fingers touched the metal, he saw the flash.
A tower of black crystal, in a starless void. A voice chanting from within the crystal, like a trapped creature. Then the tower exploded into billions of shards, each shard carrying a memory, each memory searching for a body.
He fell to his knees, the pendant clenched in his fist. Blood streamed from his nose, warm on his cold lip. In that moment, he knew two things:
The First: His true name. It was not Sion. It was another name, a long name that began and ended with sounds the human palate could not form. A name that had weight, and had a price.
The Second: That he had been something. Something great, or something monstrous. Something that had fallen.
Something that must not be found.
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He left the shed on the fifth night. The pendant under his shirt, cold against his skin. The Mark on his forehead hidden under the folds of a woolen hood. He did not know where he was heading. But his feet, as if remembering what his mind had forgotten, led him north. Towards the mountains that looked like broken teeth of the sky on the horizon.
And on the way, in the first village he found, he discovered the first power.
It was a huge, drunken man who blocked his path at a ramshackle tavern. "Your face is pretty, boy. I'll take it from you and make it a pillow for my sweetheart."
A massive fist shot towards him. Sion did not think. An instinct older than thought moved his hand. He caught the fist in mid-air. And touched the man's skin.
The scream was not of pain. It was of remembrance.
The huge man remembered, in that brief moment, everything. He remembered the moment of his birth, the first chill of air on his skin. He remembered the first betrayal he suffered. He remembered the ache of the tooth he pulled when he was ten. He remembered the smell of his sick mother, and the color of the sky on the day she was buried. Ten decades of memories, all pushed into his consciousness in a fraction of a second. His eyes rolled back, and he fell to the ground trembling like a child.
The other thugs in the tavern backed away. Their looks were a mixture of terror and pity. Sion looked at his hands. They were not burning. They were not glowing. They only... touched.
They touched a deeper truth.
He paid for the drink he had not consumed with a small silver piece he found in his bag. The tavern keeper looked at it, then at the man on the ground, then at the Mark that had shifted slightly from under Sion's hood when he bent down.
"The Black Road begins at the mountain pass." the man whispered, his voice low. "Don't ask me why I'm telling you. But he who bears the Mark... has only one road. The Road of Eternal Cold."
"And what awaits at its end?"
The tavern keeper smiled a sad, toothless smile. "In the beginning, nothing. And at the end... Oblivion. Or perhaps Remembrance. No one has ever returned to tell."
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He walked for three more days before he saw the pass. Two giant mountains met, leaving between them a narrow passage, dark even in broad daylight. On a black stone at the entrance, carved in an ancient script:
Here the journey begins. Here the self ends. Leave your memory as coin, for you will have no need of it where you are going.
Sion stood for a moment. He looked back, at the world he had never truly known. Then he looked ahead, at the darkness that seemed like a tangible substance.
He felt the cold for the first time. It was not the cold of air, but the cold of emptiness. An emptiness inside him that wanted to be filled with something, something he had lost.
He pushed the hood back slightly. The grey sky was reflected in a nearby puddle. He saw the blue Mark on his forehead glow with a faint light, responding to the place.
"So, this is the price," he said to himself. "Oblivion, for a cure I never asked for."
Then he walked into the passage. The darkness swallowed him as the sea swallows a grain of sand.
The wind, from that moment on, stopped blowing from behind him. And began to blow in his face.
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(A continuation of the novel "The Road of Eternal Cold" — Followed by Chapter One: Oblivion and Ice) ❄️