It kicks like a sleep twitch—

He remains sunken deep into the darkness, a place as near death as one can experience; everything has ceased to matter, become meaningless, for what, truly, is life without consciousness? Years could pass, slip by like currents in a river, and he would have nothing to remember them by—no vague recollection of his time comatose in a glacier, nothing but the dim, distant memory of falling into it, of slipping into chill-induced sleep, the embrace of shadow and snow. From there on until the time his eyes will open with clarity once more—nothing.

He turned thirteen years old in that glacier, just another birthday gone by unnoticed, another number notched in the scars on his bones; the only ones who remembers when he was born are far, far away, and here, well, he has never bothered to tell anyone about it.

Deeply unconscious, he doesn't know how lonely the moment was, how quickly it passed.

And had he known what his falling down here has caused, he would've withdrawn, pulled back into the shadows, ashamed that he had to be rescued—embarrassed that he pulled others from their tasks, from their lives. What is he to them? Why does he matter to them?

Black smoke—such an odd manifestation of life—creeps into his lungs.

And like ice flaking off, his frozen mind thaws.

---

(It's just like opening your eyes without opening your eyes, the most gentle twitch after you nodded off—the blue of your soul opening its eyes in the dark, but you don't see the world, because it was only your awareness waking up.)

He wasn't sure when it happened, he figured it was just like how he never knew the exact moment he fell asleep. It was only when you woke up again you knew that you had even slept at all (and thus, dying in your sleep would be terrible, because you wouldn't even know you had died), and—in a sense, it was like waking up from deep, deep sleep.

Content and laying in the sun.

For a moment, he believed it—for a moment, he could feel it, the wash of warmth across his skin, the brightness of the world beyond his closed eyelids, and the desire to stretch out where he lay upon the ground was overwhelming. To just push his hooves further out from his body, arch his back, tug his poll in the opposite direction from his dock, groan and sigh and flick his eyes open to another day.

He didn't do any of it, though. The black sludge lingered between him and his eyes, a dark cloud obscuring his body from himself, and for a time, he was content to lay in those murky waters. Waking from deep sleep could be slow.

He crossed a line. He crossed some incredibly invisible line. And suddenly he knew, it had taken too long.

Waking up wasn't this slow.

Waking up wasn't this silent.

He tried to scream. Nothing happened. He tried to bolt upright. Nothing happened. Frantic, he cast his mind into the darkness, flung it far out and wide, away from himself and into the void—and where sleepy souls should've greeted him with mild annoyance and underlying comfort, he found only silence. His mind panicked, but his heart kept beating too slow, too slow, so his brain fabricated the feel of a blood-rush, the sickening feeling of adrenaline, the drum-like noise in his ears, and thrust it upon his roving soul.

Fuck, because he was afraid, no no no no, because they'd almost been through this before. Exhausted even before he had begun, he missed them in the darkness and the silence. His mind flared bright for a moment, then collapsed; his soul tied itself into knots, because he had lost them—

The abyss opened up beneath him, and swallowed him whole.

And in the future laid out for him, barren and empty and a wasteland, he settled like dust upon it. Found its contours. Found their contours, small and smooth and snowed over. Deeper in the depths of unconsciousness than they had ever been before.

Stunned, shocked and confused, relieved and overjoyed, Mauja opened his eyes.

Saw a gigantic wolf. Understood nothing. Croaked out, "again?" in a brittle, dry voice, because he still remembered the weight of front paws upon his ribcage, and the snarl of hungry wolves roaming around his fallen body.

—you will choke, choke on the air you try to breathe.