Chapter 8 

     Timelessness crawled into Annemarie's mind as she crawled through this boreal landscape. It felt as if she had just left the first street, where she regained her senses, but she had already turned too many corners to count. She knew she was lost in-between grey tombstones of concrete and steel, but it was too late.  

     Over time Annemarie had thrown cooled out coals away. They had only been weighing her down. Now Annemarie wished that she still had them. They would still be cold and useless, but she hadn’t thought about it that far. Annemarie found the end. She had followed the repetitive, but always differently blockaded streets of the monotonous city to the end. She maybe should have dared to crawl up steeper slopes or backtrack at an earlier time. She hadn’t dared to admit that she was lost until it was too late. Now she had reached this point, a dead end.  

     She cuddled her cooling body and limped her last few steps forward.   

     The place she had found herself in felt eerily familiar. The roads converged circularly, to where she had wished the red centre was. What she found was another centre. It could’ve been a place of commerce or maybe administration. To Annemarie, it was the embodiment of the bleak city. The hard angular concrete buildings towered twice as tall as before and wide empty windows let black rooms gaze down at her.  

     She could not turn back now. She was exhausted from her long search and her legs hurt. She wouldn’t be fast if she started marching again, and she did not have time left. Her luck with the clear weather had ended as black clouds started approaching her slice of the sky.  

     This central place was solemn and monumental. Roots of ice sprouting from the edges of the buildings and grew down to the feet of the buildings. But the walls looked brittle, and the window isolation shrivelled. These buildings were built in a display of might, but now they looked almost decrepit. It was the ice’s beauty that decorated the naked grey corpses. Through the sunlight, Annemarie could see the glacial halls which formed under the overhangs of the buildings. The street was covered by a plate of ice formed by ages of meltwater. The place looked almost ethereal like made of pillars of glass, but if one looked up, one could see the ghastly concrete slabs sitting under the weight of winter. Great mats of snow gathered on top of the buildings.  

     As Annemarie moved painfully over the courtyard, she felt as if under the watchful eyes of vultures and crows. The mats of snow seemed to be only waiting to strike her down. They did not, but they burdened Annemarie with dreadful pressure.   

     Halve a fountain sprouted in the middle of the ice-covered street. Metal sculptures of men, which had once spouted water into the fountain pond, peered through the ice sheet. The sculptures were greater than life and rose over the ice with perfect features, but their seeming struggle was in vain. Annemarie saw how the ice grew from their ankles up. She could see the future and how the statues drowned in the sea of ice.  

     Behind the top of the well that sprouted through the glacial floor, the tallest building she had ever seen reigned over this empty courtyard.   

     It was a pitch-black tower akin to an obelisk. It was as oppressive as it was tall and took up more than half of the courtyard in its width. Even the streaks of light from the sun barely illuminated the black glass. If the other buildings seemed decrepit, the sharp black tower seemed as vile. It was built to be imposing and to make those who dared to approach restless. As much as it seemed to eat the light, the obelisk consumed its surroundings.  

     It was a fitting spectre for this heartless courtyard, and Annemarie sought shelter at its feet. There in the near darkness of the tower made of black glass was a spot hidden from most weather and wind. There up a flight of stairs laid the gates of this crushing behemoth.  

     Annemarie’s arms hurt as she pushed herself up to the stairs. She hoped to seek shelter inside the building made of darkness, but it wouldn’t be. The gates remained shut, it had been closed off ages ago and the hinges had frozen solid. “This will have to make do,” Annemarie thought fatigued. This was by far the largest overhang there was around this park. It would not protect her from the cutting winds of the snowstorms, but she wouldn’t be buried under a torrent of snow. She could finally catch a break. She knew it would only be wasted time, but her body couldn’t follow the demands of her spirit.   

     She walked closer to the walls of the obsidian building. She had not seen a building so fully made of glass before. It reflected her face like a mirror. As she looked closer, she could see deep into her own eyes. And as she stared harder into the glass, she could see past it. She peered into a time long past.  

     Annemarie’s lips were cracking as she slowly peered deep into the endless plane of glass.   

     She saw empty halls not even covered in dust. But a weighty gloom and demanding darkness enveloped the room while defused light shone in beams through the stale air. It had an air of dreamlike inauthenticity. Annemarie felt like looking at a reconstructed cabinet in a museum. It was like a place made into reality from a photograph. But at the same time Annemarie it felt like she was part of it. Today felt too unreal and she consigned herself to this dreamscape. She thought of fading away into this deep and never-ending darkness.   

     And soon black clouds ate the saving light of the morning sun. Annemarie was left hiding at the foot, of the black tower. It was unbeknownst to Annemarie what it was built for. It wasn’t directly meant as shelter from the weather, but the tower had been the embodiment of war against nature itself.  

     As heavy snow piled onto the icy floor in front of the overhang Annemarie hid in, she decided to spend her time observing the world behind the black mirror.  

     With no streetlights around only faint sunlight light illuminated the landscape. Annemarie didn’t mind the darkness. The lumbering overhang of the black building protected from the biting cold of the snow. The cold winds would find a way to her, but it was comfortable for now.  

     She saw decorations inside, unusual paintings, mysterious vases, and luxurious chairs. The insides of the building flowed with smooth elegance. Materials she knew bent in soothing curves and lavish pillars stood proud in the middle of the room. Those were costly materials whose process couldn’t be afforded now. The past makers couldn’t afford to make them too, but they didn’t care. The builders of the black tower weren’t those who had to pay for their extravagance.  

     Annemarie asked once again, “why would somebody build something so wasteful.” Annemarie felt the building was also lacking, but the extravagance astonished her more. 

     Annemarie’s mind had been caught wandering as she collapsed onto her knees. She was more fatigued than before, and hunger ate through her stomach. She sat down as comfortably as she could with her back to the obsidian wall.  

     Her eyes trailed over the courtyard as the snowfall intensified. She could no longer see the fountain in the middle of the icy courtyard. The wind howled through the ridges of the blank city. Above, multiple stories high, she saw a light, faint and blue, and there another and another. A chain of light snaked along the grey and cruel buildings.  

     Then as the winter snowfall grew and the lights disappeared. The winds blew quietly through the overhang as suddenly cold wet air reached out to her touching her shortly before fading away.  

     A nipping, numbing, piercing ache creaked onto little Annemarie, but she held still. What happened next shocked her deeply.  

     A creak opened in the falling snow and instead of the fountain statues, she could see a hazy figure walking along the silhouettes of the monstrous buildings of grey heartless concrete.  

     Click, clack.  

     A foggy, cloudy body wobbles around like a mantle of living sheep clouds. Its hazy contour connects with the falling snow and rips away in an endless cycle.   

     Click, clack.  

     Propelled by long wide strides of cold precision it approaches, the snow parting to give way.   

     Fear filled Annemarie’s head, and she thought, "what am I going to do? Where am I going to go? My fingers are numb. My legs are sore." She tried to move, but her legs were frozen to the ground, her legs shaking, aching.  

     Click, clack,   

     Click, clack,   

     Pater Niveus, the snow father, walks unfazed through storms of wintery time.   

     Skull like the extinct elk,   

     Shoes forged of cooled down starlight,   

     And a cloak of fog-like snow.  

     Travelling the webs of fate   

     Long gone by his final wait.