freezing.

You keep walking.\nYou walk until your legs go completely numb, half from the cold and half from exhaustion. You can't tell how much time is going by. The sky never changes, never grows darker to signal the coming night. The snow keeps falling, landing, sticking to your eyelashes, melting into your eyes. There is no wind, and the only sound is your own heartbeat in your ears, a dull drum off in the distance, being beaten forever by Skarl, trying so hard to keep the Mana-Yood-Sushai from awakening and destroying the whole world.\nWould anything be left behind, or would existence just be like this - all white, from top to bottom. Nothing else.\nWould it be so bad?\n\nHours, or maybe minutes, pass, and the speck slowly grows larger. You can almost see it. It's a small house, made of dark wood, sitting quietly directly in front of you, ice stretching forever from it from either side.\n\n<<choice "you're almost there.">>

You are close enough now that you can reach down and touch the dog if you wish.\n\n<<choice "touch the dog's ears.">>

You know better than to remove the one thing that may be keeping you from bleeding out entirely. As much as it hurts, you leave the icepick stuck deep in your flesh.\n\n<<choice "leave the hut.">>

There isn't much to see, though now at least you aren't being snowed on. If you look up, you can see the dark outline of the dog in the corner as well as the faint forms of the undersides of the few other objects on the porch.\nUnderneath where you are, nothing other than a toolbox lies quietly in the snow.\n\n<<choice "open the toolbox.">>\n<<choice "come back out from under there.">>

Clumsily, you pick up the frozen can of beer and, having no pockets or places to really put it, stash it snugly under your left arm. Despite the many layers you're wearing, you can feel its deep chill against your side.\n\n<<choice "keep going forward.">>

With some effort, you manage to push open the wooden door leading into the fishing hut. You close it behind you, shutting out the outside world for now.\nInside, a strange smell lingers in the air that you can't identify. Empty, crumpled beer cans litter the floor, and from a high point on the wall, the severed trophy head of a deer watches you with false, dark eyes.\nIn the center of the room, an icepick, stabbed deep into the ground, juts out of the ice where the hole for fishing once was. You can still see the faint outline of the hole where the ice is now thinner, but you doubt you could make a crack in it even with the ice pick. There is just no strength left in your bones to even try.\nThe walk has drained you of everything you had left.\n\n<<choice "take the icepick.">>\n<<choice "sit down.">>

And now you're being snowed on again.\n\n<<choice "go back up the stairs.">>\n<<choice "walk under the porch.">>\n<<choice "walk out onto the lake.">>

He pulls you, pulls first gently then hard enough to bruise, and when you lock eyes, when you stare into pupils dialated to the size of dinner plates, you rear back and crack him in the face with the hammer with every ounce of strength in you.\nHe screams, white hot fire and saliva spraying from his twisted mouth as he releases his grip on you and claws at his skull. You rush forward and swing the hammer again and again, ruining the human looking face and forcing the monster lurking underneath to the very surface, destroying bone structure and the hands that try to twist around you and ruin you. You strike at the shrieking beast until there is nothing left but a mess of red and pulp, nothing left but mutilated hints of what was once a breathing being, and with everything left inside you, you twist round and throw the hammer at the darkness of the walls surrounding you\n\nThey explode into light, and all things around you dissolve into a cleansing, purging fire.\n\n<<choice "wake up.">>

The dog is dead.\n\n<<choice "walk down the porch steps.">>\n<<choice "go back inside.">>

You manage to get yourself onto your feet and, somehow, get the stubborn door pried back open. You stumble out of the fishing hut and back out into the open, clutching your stomach with both hands.\n\n<<choice "go home.">>

The little house is getting closer and closer. You can see now that it isn't a house at all - too small to be a house, and who would build one in the middle of a lake like this. It's a fishing hut.\nFinally, you reach the structure.\n\n<<choice "go inside the hut.">>

It's a bitterly cold day in Vermont. The sun rose hours ago, but the thick blanket of clouds masks it in a layer of blank white nothing. It's hard to tell the sky from the snow. The world seems to be just a large paper with flecks of dirt across its surface.\nYou, in your little fleck of dirt way, step outside into the snow and cold and look around you. To your left, a sleeping dog lies motionless on the small portion of porch that isn't choked with snow. A massive lake stretches out into the horizon in front of you, its surface frozen over into glass. Behind you, the house you came from.\nSnowflakes are landing on your eyelashes.\n\n<<choice "walk towards the dog.">>\n<<choice "walk down the porch steps.">>\n<<choice "go back inside.">>

You start off across the ice towards the little speck in the distance that is the house you came from, with its porch and its dog. Your blood is making a red path behind you, showing where you came from like wetter breadcrumbs in a cold forest.\nYou walk for as long as you can, but the house in the distance hasn't grown any closer before you feel your strength slipping away.\n\n<<choice "keep going.">>\n<<choice "lie down.">>

Inside the old toolbox is a hammer.\n\n<<choice "take the hammer.">>

You can feel yourself walking down the hallway - a hallway that seems to grow longer and longer behind you, the doorway you came back in from vanishing into some incomprehensible distance - but it is as though you are not the one in control of your legs. You press into the wall, like a falling person clawing at rock to try and slow their descent, but he reaches forward and takes you by the left hand. His palm is white hot. You feel as though you're being burned.\n\n<<choice "go into the room.">>\n<<choice "kill him.">>

You try to turn around and open the door, but he is somehow behind you, and his hand reaches forward and the door dissolves into the walls around it.\nHe pulls you close, your back to his bare chest, and even through your layers and the soaking snow melting into you, you can feel how burning hot his skin and meat and bones are.\n\n<<choice "go into the room.">>

You turn round and begin your ascent back to the porch. This time, however, the staircase does not appreciate your added weight. You step squarely on a sheet of ice that you didn't see before and slide sideways when you try to move on. Your ankle twisting painfully, you lose your balance and go down, cracking your head hard first on the banister, then on the stairs as you fall.\n\nYou see blood and stars shooting every which way in front of your eyes, and then nothing at all.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIt's not so bad...

You refuse to give up. You cannot allow yourself to die like this. You're going to get help if it kills you.\nYou struggle to keep walking, and you manage to make it only a few more paces before exhaustion and pain and the knowledge of what waits for you back home swallows you alive, and your legs, your feet, your entire body simply gives out from under you. You fall facedown onto the ice, the icepick cruelly driving itself even deeper into your body as you land directly on it.\nYou could have sworn you could feel the tip of it scraping against the bone of your spine, but you were dead before you even hit the ground.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIt's not so bad...

You sit yourself down on one of the seats meant originally for fishermen and simply exhale, watching your breath come first in a puff of steam, then vanish away into nothing as the air cools to a chill.\nYou sit there for hours.\nEventually, the sun starts to set, the temperature around you dropping even lower, and you still don't move. You stay right there in your seat, and when you are too tired and cold to keep your eyes open, you lay down on your side in the blackness and close your eyes as it sucks you in.\nYou feel as though you're floating away.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIt's not so bad...

You try to tear yourself away from it, but you can't.\n\n<<choice "go into the hole.">>

You turn back around and are relieved to see that at least you haven't traveled very far. The porch and the house are all still within walking distance, and you trek back until the house is looming over you once again.\n\n<<choice "go back up the stairs.">>\n[[go under the porch.]]

You're so tired.\nEasing your body down to the ice, you lie down on your side, your breathing growing shakier and shakier as red slowly begins to pool underneath your tummy. Your shivering grows worse, worse, and worse still before you feel yourself relax.\nThe sky grows dark over you as the sun begins to set in the far distance, and you don't shiver anymore.\nThe blackness of night comes, and as you close your eyes, you almost feel warm.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIt's not so bad...

And now you're being snowed on again.\n\n<<choice "go back up the stairs.">>\n<<choice "go under the porch.">>\n<<choice "walk out onto the lake.">>

You don't care.\nYou keep walking.\nYou walk until your legs go completely numb, half from the cold and half from exhaustion. You can't tell how much time is going by. The sky never changes, never grows darker to signal the coming night. The snow keeps falling, landing, sticking to your eyelashes, melting into your eyes. There is no wind, and the only sound is your own heartbeat in your ears, a dull drum off in the distance, being beaten forever by Skarl, trying so hard to keep the Mana-Yood-Sushai from awakening and destroying the whole world.\nWould anything be left behind, or would existence just be like this - all white, from top to bottom. Nothing else.\nWould it be so bad?\n\nHours, or maybe minutes, pass, and the speck slowly grows larger. You can almost see it. It's a small house, made of dark wood, sitting quietly directly in front of you, ice stretching forever from it from either side.\n\n<<choice "almost there.">>

You turn and walk across the porch, approaching the sleeping dog, cracked ice crunching under your feet. You can see that the dog is an Alaskan Klee Kai, its white fur blending in near perfectly with its surroundings. Despite the cold, the animal sleeps soundly. What is it dreaming of?\n\n<<choice "walk closer to the dog.">>\n<<choice "walk down the porch steps.">>\n<<choice "go back inside.">>

It's an unopened, full can of beer. Someone must have dropped it a while ago, because it's entirely frozen now - and heavy. Even if you didn't have those clumsy mittens on, you still wouldn't be able to open it.\n\n<<choice "take the can.">>\n<<choice "walk forward.">>

There isn't much to see, though now at least you aren't being snowed on. If you look up, you can see the dark outline of the dog in the corner as well as the faint forms of the undersides of the few other objects on the porch.\nUnderneath where you are, nothing other than a toolbox lies quietly in the snow.\n\n<<choice "open up the toolbox.">>\n<<choice "come on out from under there.">>

Stumbling forward, you wrap your hands around the handle of the icepick and pull with all the strength you have left.\nIt doesn't budge.\nYou try again, hunching over it and yanking upwards so hard you can hear your joints creaking from the effort. You can hear yourself groaning, a high pitched whine of pain and anger at the tool for not coming free-\n\n-and then it does, ripping out of the ice so suddenly that you go tumbling forwards. Your jaw cracks into the ice, and you scream in agony as the ice pick plunges itself all the way to the hilt into your belly.\n\nYou lay there for you don't know how long, your blood steaming as it rapidly cools. The ice is growing more and more red.\n\n<<choice "pull the icepick out.">>\n<<choice "leave the icepick in.">>

And now you're being snowed on again.\n\n<<choice "go back upstairs.">>\n<<choice "walk onto the lake.">>

You try to stand up so you can leave this place and get help, but you can't even get yourself up onto your knees. Blood is pouring out of your stomach, and you can taste something coppery drooling from your mouth. Your strength is draining from you so fast that you only have enough energy to wrench yourself upright into a sitting position before you find you cannot move at all.\n\nIn a few hours, the sky grows dark as the sun starts to set. The earth turns from white to grey to a deep, cold black.\nYou are dead. You and the liquids that have come out of you froze to the rest of the ice before the sun even decided to begin setting.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIt's not so bad...

You inch closer to the dog. The wind is whipping at your face, but the dog doesn't seem to mind and sleeps like a baby through the weather. Its nose is a deep black, little ice crystals clinging to it, and its ears are erect and alert. You find it strange.\n\n<<choice "walk closer.">>

Mezmerized by the possibilities of what may lay out there in the white distance, you ignore all else around you and step forward again, one foot in front of the other, a slow march into the unknown. Your boots are old, and several times you feel yourself slip, but you manage to keep yourself upright as you walk.\nThe speck in the distance seems to grow no closer.\n\n<<choice "keep walking.">>

You bash the can against the frozen lock of the toolbox with all your might. Once, twice - and success. The lock, brittle already with frost and rust, snaps off, and the toolbox is thus unlocked.\n\n<<choice "open the unlocked toolbox.">>

You start to walk out, but something jutting out of the ice grabs your attention from the corner of your eye.\n\n<<choice "investigate.">>\n<<choice "keep walking.">>

The lock is frozen shut. Even if you had a key, you wouldn't be able to open it.\n\n<<choice "come out from under there.">>

You walk until you feel your knees start to ache. The speck in the distance, however is no closer.\nAre you sure you want to do this? Maybe you're not wearing enough layers. Maybe the speck is too far. Maybe this is just a stupid idea all around.\nMaybe this. Maybe that.\n\n<<choice "go back home.">>\n<<choice "push yourself ahead.">>

You wake up in your room in your own bed, the watery sunlight of that winter morning streaming through your blinds and across the serene face of the drooling monster sleeping next to you.

You reach the bottom of the stairs with little problem. Not a lot has changed since you've been gone.\n\n<<choice "walk onto the lake.">>

You walk back up the stairs, clinging the banister tightly, and soon you're back in front of the door you came out of. Oddly, the dog isn't in the corner of the porch anymore.\n\n<<choice "go inside the house.">>\n<<choice "go back down the stairs.">>

Clinging to the railing, you make your way down the wooden steps. You can hear them all groaning and creaking under you from the cold they've had to endure, but miraculously they don't give out.\nThe snow at the bottom is powdery and soft and crunches lightly under your feet as you step off the staircase. The house seems to loom over you now, while the frozen-over lake now seems to stretch out into the horizon, going on forever. If you squint, you can see a tiny black dot in the distance on the lake, but you cannot make out what it is.\n\n<<choice "go back up the stairs.">>\n<<choice "walk under the porch.">>\n<<choice "walk out onto the lake.">>

The dog doesn't move. Its ears are stiff.\n\n<<choice "touch the dog.">>

And now you're being snowed on again.\n\n<<choice "go back up the stairs.">>\n<<choice "walk under the porch.">>\n<<choice "walk out on the lake.">>

There are no windows. The blackness swallows you into damp, choking heat. You can feel your muscles trying to melt off your skeleton. He is fumbling with your zipper. Something is pouring down your face, and you don't know if it's sweat or skin or tears.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIt's not so bad...

The ice holds you as you step out onto it and leave the snow and stairs behind. You look down and wonder how thick this ice must be. If you could somehow cut down through it to whatever unfrozen water remained, would you have to saw down through foot after foot of the stuff?\nYou can't help but feel as though the house is watching you leave. Its windows feel like dozens of dark eyes.\nThe speck in the distance remains as small as ever. You still can't tell what it is.\n\n<<choice "walk forward.">>

Pushing the sliding door open, you step back into the house, snow falling off you and landing soundlessly on the checkerboard tile floor under you. Your hat comes off, and snow slides from your wet hair onto your shoulders.\n\nYou look up from your shoes, down to the end of the hallway, and you can see him looking at you. He is standing in the doorway, smiles and blackness and a mattress older than you in the room behind him.\n\n<<choice "go to him.">>\n<<choice "go back outside.">>

You lean over the icepick and grasp it tight with your left hand. With your right hand, you raise the hammer high and swing down as hard as you can.\nThe icepick cracks right through the thinner ice it's stuck in, and you're able to pull the icepick free. You keep working, chipping away at the thin ice bit by bit, until finally, you've cleared it all away.\nWhat you're left with is a black hole, like a huge, dialated, dead pupil, black freezing water sloshing gently below, almost hypnotizing. You can feel your grip on your tools loostening as you stare down into the never ending blackness.\n\n<<choice "go into the hole.">>\n<<choice "go sit down.">>

You lift the hammer out of the metal box and tuck it under your arm where the can of beer used to be. It's nowhere near as cold as the can was, which is a small relief.\n\n<<choice "get out from under there.">>

The lock is frozen shut. Even if you had a key, you wouldn't be able to open it.\nBut you DO have that heavy can of frozen beer under your arm.\n\n<<choice "hit the toolbox with the can.">>

You let your body go limp, and you feel yourself lurching forward further, further, until your center of gravity can no longer hold you in place, and you slide down the hole into the inky blackness.\nThe water is so unbelievably cold that it almost feels like burning fire. Your thick clothes soak through immediately, and their weight and your exhaustion all pull you down even further into the void and the frost and the claustrophobic blackness. From all around you, you almost feel as though the fish that aren't frozen yet are staring at you as you the last of the air escaping from your panicking lungs, float down towards some incomprehensible, colossal beast, lurking at the bottom of the lake and the darkness and the cold burning fire, ready to suck you in and swallow you alive and keep you inside forever.\nAnd ever.\nHeld tightly inside forever and ever and ever.\n\n\n\n\n\n\nIt's not so bad...

Gnawing your bottom lip to shreds, you grasp the handle and, taking a deep, ragged breath, rip the icepick free and out of your abdomen with one ragged shriek of pain. Blood immediately begins to spray from the puncture wound, spattering the wooden seats around you with little droplets.\n\n<<choice "leave the fishing hut.">>