Chapter Text
The icy wind cut into my clothes like knives, crystal dust slicing through the layers to chill my skin. I pulled my cloak closer to me, but I was fighting a losing battle. The fabric was stiff with frost; what wasn't frozen solid was slightly wet from my body heat. Within minutes it would freeze, and within the hour I would too.
Getting caught in a blizzard was not how I imagined I would die. I'd been traversing the Alabaster Icelands in search of rare Pokemon and, having seen something glimmer in the distance, had stepped out onto a flat plain of ice. That'd been my mistake, and it was probably going to be a fatal one. I couldn't have known, but what I was standing on was far from solid ground. The ice sheet broke beneath my weight and sent me plummeting down the steep edge of a hill.
The stones had battered me on the way down, but it was the ice and snow that landed on top of me at the bottom that proved to be the true danger. The ice cut through my protective layers like paper, and the powder was all too happy to creep into the cuts, stealing my warmth. By the time I dug myself out, most of my strength and warmth was sapped.
My Pokeballs were lost—my friends and only chance of salvation gone. I knew they'd be okay, secure in their digitized habitats, but they were buried under who knew how much avalanche slag and digging to find them was not an option. It hurt to know that my Arcanine's lifesaving flame was probably only feet away, but searching for them would only hasten my death. I needed to stay moving.
So I trekked onward, disoriented and following the natural lines of the wide valley I'd fallen into. That was when the blizzard hit. It had built behind the bluff, out of sight, leaving me no time to prepare, and it brought with it certain death.
Each step was slower than the last. I tried to reach around to pull my cloak closer once more, but either my hands wouldn't close around it, or it was simply too ruined to be grabbed. I checked, and realized that it was gone.
I was so cold that I hadn't even noticed when the wind stole it from me.
Slowly, the edges of reality blurred, the green undersides of pine trees fading into the storm. Falling to your knees when you can't feel anything is a surreal experience. The only indication I had was that of my vision getting lower, as if I'd shrunk. I knew the warmth in my limbs was the onset of hypothermia. Was I going to die on my knees? I thought I'd at least fall forward, but the snow was building around my legs in such a way that it kept me from tipping to one side or the other.
My hands were dangling in the snow. A small mercy, then, that I couldn't feel them anymore. Even lifting them seemed like a monumental task; I managed to place them in my lap. At least I'd die with a little dignity intact.
I was having trouble feeling anything anymore. I knew I should've been hearing the howl of the blizzard, but there was only quiet. I'd lost my navigational sense long ago, the world was pure white, no sense of where the horizon met the ground.
I wondered if this was what death was like. Was I already gone? Was the afterlife pure white, like freshly fallen snow? I'd expected black, honestly. This was almost. . . peaceful.
Using the last of my strength I muttered out a useless prayer to the useless god that brought me to this past to die. " Arceus, please save me, " I said, and then I closed my eyes.