My pen hovered above the paper, unable to form another word. My mind was like a storm-damaged videotape—images warped, sound distorted. The figure rising from the shattered Ice Crystal Cocoon was wrapped in dense, impenetrable red light. I couldn't see her face clearly, but that smile… I knew that smile. It hung at the core of the crimson glow, a crescent both merciful and otherworldly.

Ice crystal fragments transformed into billions of glittering motes, swirling around me like living fireflies carrying bone-chilling cold and sacred whispers. The basement wasn't a storage room anymore but the heart of a nebula—a birthing chamber for a new reality.


The luminous silhouette reached out its "hand" to me.

I didn't see it—I felt it with my mind. Not flesh touching flesh, but a cold, gentle energy bypassing skin and bone to caress my very soul. Like a mint dissolving in my brain, sending cool shivers to every cell in my body.

"Come… my child…"


The voice bypassed my ears, becoming a color—a warm red liquid with golden veins pouring directly into my mind. Fear and confusion dissolved like sandcastles in the tide, leaving only the perfect peace of an infant returning to the womb.

"…embrace me…"


I rose. My body wasn't mine anymore—just a marionette on invisible strings. Like a sleepwalking pilgrim, I moved through the crystal stardust toward the light, toward that familiar-yet-strange silhouette. The floor wasn't concrete anymore—I walked on shattered moons and solidified starlight.

The scent changed too. That sweet vanilla and wintergreen vanished, replaced by something older and vaster—the smell of permafrost, of the vacuum between stars, of time itself slowly eroding.

I stretched out my arms.

I embraced it.

When I touched that sphere of light, reality shattered around me.

My body dissolved—not painfully, but like salt returning to its mother ocean. Cold and warmth weren't opposites anymore but twisted together in shivering ecstasy. Fear and love fused into a single supreme emotion—reverence.

Time lost all meaning. Past, present, and future coiled together like serpents eating their own tails. I saw Mom teaching me constellations in the backyard when I was little; Dad coming home laughing in his muddy hunting clothes; myself days ago taping windows like a lunatic; even the future—blood moons shattering into billions of suns, illuminating countless dark-twisted worlds.

These visions spun like glass fragments before my eyes until a pure, merciful, endless red light consumed them all.

My self—my very identity—faded like dying embers.

In my final moment of awareness, I "heard" Her whisper in my core. Not human language but a harmonious, higher-dimensional resonance containing all information. It told me this wasn't death but homecoming; not an end but a true beginning.

The journal fell to the floor, open to the final page.

After "It was Mom's smile. I…" the ink trailed off in a long, trembling streak.

Below were signs of struggle. A few distorted words, twisted by immense pain:

"…cold…light…singing…"

Further down, language dissolved into frantic, desperate scrawls—the final spasms of a dying hand.

The scrawls converged at the bottom of the page.

There, one perfect symbol remained, carved deeply into the paper with final, desperate strength.

A complex Ice Crystal Pattern—six-branched and symmetrical as a snowflake.

It lay there silently, gleaming with cold, mysterious radiance in the eternal red light seeping through the basement door.

The house was deathly quiet.

Just an empty freezer with its lid thrown wide.

And that endless, low, satisfied humming—like it came from the very depths of the cosmos.