The first thing Josh registered as his eyes rolled back to the front of his skull was the biting cold piercing his bones, his head throbbing, and his body aching in places he couldn’t believe existed. The morning air was sharp, stinging with the smell of snow and earth and cutting his nose. For a moment, all he could see was a blur of white; The forest surrounding him seemed endless and cold, stretching out like some barren, frozen wasteland. A low, drawn-out groan squeezed through his dry throat as he forced himself up, his palms slipping against the ice beneath him, jagged nails scraping across it. His breath came out in short, frantic bursts, and it mixed with the frigid air to make a foggy spiral, swirling in front of him.

Josh’s mind teeter-tottered between fragments of memory: A haunting recollection of snarling, a massive shape covered in mangy fur bearing down on him with dead eyes. His pulse quickened in his chest just building the puzzle. Instinctively reaching for his sides, feeling the cold, damp fabric of his torn clothes, he blinked dumbly, touching his limbs over and over. There were gashes on his arms--scratches that burned with the kind of pain he couldn’t escape, as though they were embedded into his very flesh--he remembered it vividly. So why, then, isn't he wincing in pain? Where's the blood?

His eyes darted around frantically, but all his panicked gaze was met with was the vast silence that haunted the expanse of snow and ice, its horizon stretching endlessly in every direction. A wind howled across the landscape, whistling through the trees in the distance, but there was no sign of the wolf-like creature that had attacked him. Had it left? Or was it still out there, waiting for him to make a move? Struggling to his feet, his legs nearly buckled beneath him as he forced them to carry him to the nearest road. The cold was unbearable, gnawing at his exposed flesh, and his body was shaking, though from the icy temperature or the sheer terror that still gripped him, he couldn’t tell.