Older Things Than These

Cold and color.  My thoughts murmured over each syllable as I wrote them.  Cold and color, the color of my breath on the cold air - not white, but pale blues and greys and little glints of green.  The cold of arctic air slurring my breath and slowing my tongue.  I wrote cold verses on the brittle breadth of my parchment.  I got tired, after a while, and stared through the growing patterns of ghostlight on the edges of my vision.  The darkness crystallized slowly at my eye-edge.  Slowly creeping, the eddies of blur and black shift inward.  Unme.  Later, I discovered that though blind I lived.  Some slow scratch of pencil on paper caught at the edges of my creaking mind.  My hand.  With seeping terror I moved my left to my right.  I crept my leathered gloves, stiff in frost, up from the still moving pencil grip, above the numbed wrist, higher, and in a blur to the raw flesh and bone, the point of frozen severance where my still writing hand lay disconnected.  In the dark I folded slowly, my shock completing the numb, my numb smoothing my broken skin, my broken skin bunching again to dark crevices of perfect pain into which great swathes of me sank - pieces I could not reclaim.