Blood and earth… the first thing I feel is the taste of blood and earth… then, darkness, and like fire on my skin, everywhere… I can’t open my eyes, everything burns… the silence is broken, a hiss that tears through the space pierces my eardrums… my ears hear nothing else…
I believe I’m starting to recover, I realize that I’m crushed, buried alive… snow, earth are everywhere… a silence explodes in my ears… then comes a pain, unlike the rest, it feels real: it seems to come from my left arm, like a stabbing pain that pierces through me…
I dig. My hands are burning, I can’t feel them, but somehow, they move at my command… my eyes begin to emerge from the darkness: I see a distant glow in front of me, urging me to fight… the pain is intense, the more I move, the more it tears at me… I should accept staying still and waiting to die, but my will manages to overcome this acceptance.
I smell the fresh air, I open my mouth and fill my lungs as much as I can, I spit, cough, and eventually vomit. My eyes are starting to reactivate, and I begin to see something beyond the light: an expansive field, all white, dotted with dark objects, they seem like stones, but I could be wrong… I’m still very confused, I’m on all fours and I see that the snow beneath me is becoming stained with blood… I am the one staining the snow red, I feel a warm flow on my left hand, I can’t understand anything else due to the excruciating pain in my arm… now, I can recover, I’m kneeling and I raise my head to the sky and see the clear, cold blue sky above me.
I have a wounded arm, I’m losing blood, and I can’t move it. All around me, silence, I hear the distant sigh of the wind now that the hiss in my ears is fading… I try to understand, but I don’t yet have the clarity I need. I realize that the priority is my arm: with my right hand, I take my left arm and bend it across my chest… I feel it’s limp, and with every slightest movement, the pain intensifies. I have a broken arm, and, judging by the pain in my head, I’ve also suffered head injuries… but I also realize that I have non-lethal wounds, I can move, and I begin to look around, hoping to understand the situation.
Finally, I start to think, the pain is intense but it allows me to focus and remember the last moments before the darkness: we were in a caravan and we were crossing the pass of… I can’t remember the name of that majestic mountain I had in front of me, all covered in snow and jagged by dark stone blades running upwards, towards a peak as sharp as a spear tip.
I still can’t fully grasp the situation, but I realize that I’m regaining more and more clarity. I look around: I don’t see anyone, I don’t sense the presence of any companions, yet the caravan I was traveling with was large… I need to reconstruct what happened, and only then will I be sure I’ll understand… now I’ve regained my senses, and I realize that what breaks the whiteness of the snow are not stones… they are my travel companions…
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