AAre you shivering?

Are you cold?

At the cliffs edge, where the brittle bones of the land jutted skywards like the ribs of a leviathan, the ocean was gone. A long time has passed. The great expanse of water that had once swallowed this horizon had raced, dried up, leaving behind a basin salt-crusted stones, its surface was cracked and glimmering faintly, snow had been eating away at it, piled up around it. Glistening. The pale light of the sun just barely able to pierce through a hail of white, the air burned cold, cold that buried itself deep in the marrow, and the snow fell relentless, sharp as glass, spectral white against the grayness and blackness of this frozen land.

And there, suspended above the suffocating white of the basin, was The Wheel.

It was a blackness so complete, an absence rather than a defining force, a void carved from the fabric of being. Perfect circular, hovering motionless, yet at its edges it twisted imperceptibly, an eternal gyration that was a thought you couldn't hold onto. Seeming to drink all light around it, a hole in existence, bending the snowflakes that dared to fall just in reach of its gravitational pull, the faint curvature of the mass it reflected.

The air near it was alive, colorful-uncolour, trembling with a low hum that resonated from The Wheel. Not sound in the ordinary sense, a vibration, a shivering through skin and stone, an undercurrent which gnawed at the sense, uneasy, unfiltered. It vibrated deeper than hearing, deeper than thought, something which was primordial, which resonated at the threshold of actuality.

Pulse of an ancient drum.

Came whooshing.

Cutting through wind.

Slicing silence with ease.

Erratic.

Violent.

Exhalation.

Impossible living.

Flakes swirled so violent like a wheel, drawn to the center but never touching. The edges dissolving, lines and shapes of the blurry formations in the distant bending into impossible geometry, reality folding in on itself. Fracture. Moments breaking apart. Folding over and over. Collapsing forever.

Pebbles crumbling into the desiccated basin.

Revolving wheel.

Motion and stillness at once.

Barren expanse.

Shivering in the cold.

The Wheel stared, with no eyes, no face, no form, only its hum.

Silent.

Cold.

Scared.

Silver lands.

Inescapable.

Author's Note