It's Cold

I come to all at once.

There is a drowsy heaviness, as if I have only just woken, and everything around me is cold. My eyes are open, and I cannot see a thing in front of me. I try to move my body. It will not move. It is not even a matter of failing to move — I cannot feel a body at all.

What is this.

All I feel is a sickening sense of floating, and a thin, chilly cold.

I try to shout. Nothing comes. Only a stifling pressure that goes on and on.

Think. Think it through.

Right up until a moment ago I had worked a long day, come home, and cracked a bottle. Follow that logically, and I drank myself into a collapse and fell asleep. I fell asleep drunk. It is strangely cold. So it is still before dawn? Then have I been pinned by sleep paralysis?

Turn it over as I might, there is nothing else it could be. Hands won't move, feet won't move, eyes won't open — if this isn't sleep paralysis, what else would you call it?

And yet there is a nasty cold along with the weightlessness. The feeling of hanging in empty air, and a chill that drives, strangely, all the way down into the bone.

A dream?

Then I will ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠wake eventually.

So I waited.

But I could not get up.

I swore. I cursed. I begged. I tried everything there was to try.

But I could not get up.

I waited until the cold had seeped in so slowly that I could no longer call up what warmth even felt like.

But I could not get up.

No matter how long I waited, no matter how I screamed screams that made no sound, nothing in that empty cold dark ever changed.

I waited. I stayed still. I could not have moved in the first place.

And then, all at once, I found a light.

A bright light, and a warm warmth. I knew it the moment I saw ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠it. There was something up there I wanted.

But I had forgotten. That I could not move. That all I could do was lie still and look up.

The lights grew, one and then another. What I wanted was right there, and I had to look up at it without moving. What my heart longed for was up there. What I could not give up was up there. What I had to have was up there.

Now the lights fill the space above me like a night sky.

From beneath the surface I look up without end, turning over and over the memories of the days when I was a person — a time that feels now like the ancient past, and yet rises in my head with vicious clarity. I try so hard to imagine warmth, worn away like a photograph looked at for too long, until not even a trace of it remains to remember. Of course, trying does not mean I can feel it.

And then one light fell.

Down.

Down.

Down.

Plop.

Past the surface, and under it.

At last.

The light illuminated this deep sea, and only then did I barely understand that this place was not a sea. Above the surface. Beyond that sky. I know the shining stars are not truly shining stars.

There was no sea.

The sea was me.

A light is a life dying in its last agony. A life packed full of resentment and packed full of despair, dead in the act of cursing the world. I rolled it this way and that, and for the first time in so long I received a very faint warmth. It was sweet, and it was delicious — the way ice cream is, when you have eaten nothing but plain rice for weeks and then finally have some.

If I had known nothing, that alone would have been enough.

Unfortunately, I know this taste is bitter.

The unlucky. The ones the world threw away. The ones who simply did wrong. The ones whose country was rotten. Only those who had tumbled off the social ladder and come to hate someone, or who had despaired of everything, came to me, one by one. Only lives that had fallen all the way to the bottom come to me.

Taste that light a little at a time, and I could see how the life had been lived. Of course the seeing lasted only an instant, and after a brief suck it vanished. Then I had to wait a very long time for the next light to fall.

One. Two. Three. Four.

I was waiting for them to drop, off and on, when at some point none fell to me for a very long while. A very long while. I have no sense of time at all, so I couldn't say whether it truly took that long, or whether hardly any time had passed!

So I decided to reach a hand toward a light that had drawn close beneath the surface.

And I touched it.

Huh? That's strange.

Since when did I have a hand? Think as I might, I had no memory of ever moving anything like this. But the hunger to feel warmth again, after so long, was greater than the question.

The hand drifted slowly and met the light. Climbing above the surface was not easy, of course. I had a hand, but it was as if an invisible wall stood there, and all I could do was ripple against it. Still — little by little, and thinner and thinner — I compressed the sea that was me, the way one condenses a thing, and made a needle of it. Up. Up. Up.

And a hand so fine it was nearly invisible beside the light rose and touched the light floating just above the surface.

This one was not a dead life, like the others. It was a life still living. A vessel cracked as if despair would shatter it — but a far warmer warmth.

The light seized my hand. A life with an unhappy past of its own clutched tight and begged me to save it.

But I had nothing I could give. What was I supposed to do, when there was nothing I could do?

Then I looked at the thin stretch of me that had already crossed the surface.

What if I gave it more of me?

I pushed myself upward and met an invisible wall, hard as stone, but my hand had already pierced it, and so I rose with that hand. The light was delighted. It laughed, saying an enormous power had come into its ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠grasp, and then the laughter stopped.

And it screamed.

"Stop. Stop."

But I could not stop. I had nothing left to push with. I was only staying still.

Pop!

The light flared, explosive, then turned black and dyed every light around it the same black. And together with that light itself, other stars that had been far away fell to me.

Oh.

This is the moment a primitive human discovered fire.

What had happened? I licked the shard that had gone cloudy, and I saw it. The creature I had given power to had exploded, and in exploding it had dragged in other creatures that were living in peace. Caught in the blast, they died together. Die like that, and you fall to me.

Once a different class of them appeared, I could set up a few hypotheses.

I seem to be something like a mass of power. I still remember, without a single gap, the time I was a person — faded of color though it is — so I was not like this from the start. Reincarnation, or something of the sort, I suppose.

Warmth matters more than that.

This place, if I had to compare it, is full of cold the way it is when you step out in the dead of winter without thinking, in nothing but a thin jacket, and then stand in a line outdoors for a very long time. A single small light feels like holding a hand warmer that goes dead in thirty minutes. So I want more warmth. If I ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠could get hot enough to be sick of heat, I would have no regrets left. I want this cold, soaked into the marrow, gone.

And so I think about how I might get more of it.

The explosion just now. The vessel meant to hold power had been a wreck from the beginning. Pour the water that is me into a vessel like that, and of course it breaks. But the fact that the me which spilled out swept through everything around it — that is a considerably important factor. Especially this: every life caught up in it and killed falls to me.

They had been lights sitting quite high, and each of them had been living well enough in their own way, hadn't they? Parents. Children. Or a very fine future already drawn. Or a fortune fattened by something only a little bit bad. Good and evil have nothing to do with it. The will to go on into the future, or happiness, or joy — in short, live well, and you seem to sit up high. And then, of course, the light is brighter, and the warmth is greater.

But unlike the height of those lights as I look up at them from the bottom, in the world where they lived they had been physically close to one another. So when the thing exploded they were caught and died, and wherever they touched me even a little, they fell to me. Plop, down under the sea that is me.

I can guess it like this. Reach for a light near the surface, push myself up into it, and burst it — and the light multiplies.

Then, next. Produce the same result again, and I can have more warmth. I decided to try at once. The more the lights increase, the more of them draw close beneath the surface.

The place I used to live had been drowning in despair as well. The country I lived in birthed fewer lives than it had in times of world war or plague. A world where death had overtaken birth. Think of that, and the number of people in despair will only grow. The more lights there are, the more lights will come toward me.

Toward me.

So whenever one drew near the surface that is me, I reached out. When my hand touched a light, I pushed myself in, and without fail it exploded. Each time, they came pattering down. But it was too much of a one-off. And too little fell.

And then it came to me.

A black magician making a contract with a wicked demon. That sort of thing. There were games, once, about hunting demons, and stories of that kind are very common. Give them power, and let them do as they please. That power is me, so any life that dies by me is certain to fall to me.

Mm!

Do it now.

So I tried feeding it upward, gently. Very gently. Slowly. A little at a time. Ever so finely……

Ah.

They all burst.

A life full of despair has a vessel already in tatters. The lights glittering far off are solid, but a light fallen down here would not be strange if it vanished at any moment. They are sweet when I lick them, granted. The ones who died screaming were sweeter still, so the higher they sit, the likelier they are to hold more warmth. Warmth is sweetness.

So I looked over every one of the countless stars riding above the endless sea. Time is infinite anyway, and I do not die merely for lack of warmth. Now and then, when it seemed I really might die of this, I hunted in between — but I do not want to be satisfied with that.

Lease out power. Take those who die by that power the way one collects rent. And when they die, take all of them.

Unearned income!

I do not want to have to hunt the way I do now. I want the hunting to run on its own. This is how intelligence is meant to be used.

But push in even a little power and they all burst, so what am I to do about that?

It was on a day I was worrying over it. A thin thread came down from that high sky and touched me. The other end of the thread was fastened to a light high above. I caught the thread, thinking I was about to be drawn in — and in an instant I was sucked up into that high place.

Huh?

I have something like this in my memory.

Don't tell me I was hooked?

And for the first time in a truly long while, everything around me was terribly loud. Inside and outside both, loud enough to hurt my head. Blood flowing, a heart beating, the sense of every cell within me moving — irritation came flooding in for real.

I opened my eyes for the first time in a truly long while.

A building in a pitch-black style I have never once seen. And before me, people with dingy black cloth thrown over them, heads bowed.

A language I do not know. And yet I understand it as I hear it. Then it is a language I know.

Listening, I looked down. Pale skin. Not a stitch of clothing — stark naked, seated on a hard stone chair. And bright red blood running down my body, all the way to the stone beneath.

There is a chest, protruding in its own way, but a hole has been opened through the middle of it, as if gouged out with a drill, and the severed vessels jut from the wound. I lift a horribly heavy hand into my line of sight, and what I see is a hand that must once have been very small, and soft. It is cold now.

Around me, the people lying face-down are chanting a spell.

A considerably simple spell. But the cadence is different from the one speaking in front, so that, at least, is a spell. Convenient, that it needs no interpreting.

Anyway. A sinister building. People draped in dingy cloth. A girl with her heart torn out. And me, summoned inside her.

These are heretics.

No. My name is not some fuck-sounding name like that.