She looked so strange that I could not take my eyes off her. As I stared in fascinated horror at the farrago of lights and colours that appeared to be moving and revolving under her skin like little planets and stars all I could do was stand there with my mouth opening and closing like a fish out of the water.
I was in an ice cavern doing research on extremophiles. At the young age of twenty-one, I was fascinated by the bacteria which could survive at extreme conditions, for example, at extremely low or high temperatures and high acidicity or alkaline conditions. Scientists were trying to utilise these extremophiles for the good of mankind. As I entered the ice cavern early this morning drawn back by memories of my past and the thought of obtaining new samples, I remembered the irresistible force that seemed to have pulled me across the continents I had put between myself and my origins, the ice cavern.
I was born in the ice caverns from an unholy union of a raving vampire mage and my human mother. I grew up my body learning to change its temperature at will so that I would survive here not dissimilar from the same extremophiles I was looking for. Even now, my mind would not and could not go back to the times I was tortured here in this same chambers, could not relive the brutal murder of my mother. At all times, my mind bumped into a blank wall, as if my memories had been altered, when I attempted to look back to the past, to find my roots, my fons et origo. Fortunately, I had escaped these caverns, never to return, the stench of death always by my side.
Yet, here I was again, staring at the perfectly preserved remains of my mother, beautiful yet gruesome, buried beneath a five inch thick, clear pane of ice, as if she were looking at me from another world. My mind immediately cut off the images of the past as I tried not to look anywhere else but at her beloved face, tried to shut off the terrible wounds on her arms and legs. Red, liquid tears fell from my eyes as I saw the plight of her condition and I began hysterically hacking at the pane of ice, to no avail. I knew it would never work, no matter how hard I struck, but I still continued pummelling the unbreakable barrier, forged with blood and death, which imprisoned her, made her eternal and yet living in death. I knew all this, as it was her sacrifice, my father’s magic and my blood, forcefully taken, which sealed her there while she still lived.
The crumbling noise of ice alerted me to the fact that this used to be a cavern of the mages, well, one dead mage. Admittedly my father was long dead, but that did not mean the various enchantments he ad placed on the cavern died with him, the proof of my mother before my very eyes. I began to sense an evil presence permeating through the Stifling conditions of the ice caverns, buried deep within the Carpathian Mountains. I could see dust and water vapour slowly coagulating to form human forms. I grabbed my backpack and slowly edged back.
I knew what was coming. The shadow warriors were spirits of the dead who were forcefully called and bound as guardians. They would never obtain eternal rest and were immortal, outliving the mage who called them, performing the tasks they were honour-bound to perform from beyond the dead. Any movement would immediately cause them to converge on me with flaming swords. The perfect guards indeed, as I thought bitterly, staring at death yet again. Well, I definitely refused to die here. I ran through the cavern, calling down an avalanche f ice from the ceiling as I searched frantically for anything that resembled an exit.
As I streamed through the cave, desperately searching for an exit I knew my father would definitely have came up with for his own use, I feverishly flipped through the incantations and spells in my mind, searching to stall the shadow warriors. Hearing the ominous swing of a blade, I stood stock still, trying to curl myself in a ball to preset a smaller target. As the shadow warriors searched futilely in the next chamber without my movements to aid them, I became horrible aware that the water vapour in the cavern was slowly crystallizing into fine particles of ice. Inhaling the ice would definitely kill me. The ominous clicking and whirring of my father’s little ‘pets’, his experiments gone wrong and began to grow louder too as they stirred below the ground.
There! I saw a strange arrangement of stones, innocent yet purposeful. Bitterly arranging myself, I started chanting, trying to recall the correct words. I could feel the presence of the shadow warriors, inching relentlessly closer as they swept the cavern searching for me. I quickly arranged the rocks in a pentagram and jumped into the hole opening, venturing into the sunlight. Before I left the cavern completely, I took one last look on the beloved face and called down more ice to seal the cave, forever. I knew now that the strange pull that had called me back was her sacrifice. She had suffered a fate worse than death to save me, creating a diversion while I escaped so many years ago.
As I surveyed the mountain side I emerged to, I looked down on the thing I held in my hand. A fragment of ice from her tomb. Lights and colours were swirling within it, perfectly preserved just as she was. As I watched, it turned into a glass teardrop, the only momento I would ever have of her. I cried as I watched the blazing sunset.
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