Chapter 1: Snowy Night
959words
Consciousness returned with a bone-deep chill that threatened to freeze my very soul.
It was a slow, cruel invasion—countless ice needles piercing skin and muscle before plunging into my marrow, releasing pure malice. Then came the excruciating pain at the back of my head, as if someone had taken a crowbar to my skull. Each heartbeat yanked at my nerves, playing a muffled symphony of agony.
My eyelids weighed a ton, taking everything I had just to crack them open. My vision swam with shimmering gray-white static, like an old TV searching for signal. The air bit with damp cold, tinged with the scent of frozen earth. I forced myself to focus. Slowly, the blur sharpened—a leaden sky threatening to crash down; skeletal tree branches reaching upward like the arms of the dying, draped with melting snow.
I lay sprawled on the snow, the biting cold beneath me creating an eerie balance with the throbbing inside my skull—both confirming I was still alive. A park bench loomed at the edge of my vision, its metal and wood frame forming harsh angles against the white. Tiny, dense snowflakes fell in silence, steadily burying this quiet world beneath a perfect shroud.
Sitting up nearly killed me. The moment I lifted my torso from the snow, pain exploded in my skull. Darkness flooded my vision as dizziness and nausea surged up my throat. I collapsed against the bench, gasping for breath, each inhale like swallowing shards of ice.
Who the hell am I?
The question hit like a bullet to the brain. What followed wasn't an answer but a bottomless pit of nothing. My name, my past, my purpose—everything that defined "me" had been wiped clean, leaving only a terrifying void.
I pressed my temples hard, trying to wring out any scrap of memory from the chaos, but got nothing but more pain and nausea for my trouble. I was a newborn dropped in a foreign country—lost, terrified, not even knowing my own tongue.
Through the desperate haze, my vision finally cleared. And then I saw it.
Just yards away, something violated the pristine white landscape.
A woman. Face-down in the snow, twisted at impossible angles like a discarded doll. Her bright red wool coat screamed against the white backdrop—too vivid, too raw—like fresh blood blooming across virgin snow, a violent declaration against the silence.
My heart seized, gripped by an icy fist. Primal fear shot up my spine like lightning, freezing the blood in my veins. I tried to scream, but my throat produced only a raspy wheeze. I wanted to run, but my limbs refused to obey, locked in place by terror.
"Calm down." A strange voice echoed in my head—cold and mechanical, yet commanding. I had no idea where it came from, but in my panic, it became my only lifeline.
I forced myself to breathe deep, each inhale scraping my throat raw. Swallowing the scream building in my chest, I gave up on my useless legs and dropped to all fours. Like a terrified animal, I crawled inch by inch toward that splash of crimson.
The snow yielded beneath me, my hands and knees sinking into its soft embrace as cold knifed through my clothes. Those few yards might as well have been miles. With each inch gained, the details of her coat sharpened, and the sickly-sweet copper tang of blood grew stronger in the air.
Finally, I reached her.
I knelt beside her, my hand trembling as I reached out. My fingertips—numb from cold and fear—felt detached from my body. After seconds of hesitation, I gritted my teeth and pressed my fingers against her exposed neck.
Nothing. No pulse.
Her skin felt cold and stiff, with the hopeless texture of something no longer human. Dead. The realization hit like a sledgehammer to my gut. I jerked back and heaved, hands braced in the snow, but produced nothing but bitter bile.
A mix of curiosity and morbid fascination pulled me back to her after I'd caught my breath. I needed answers. Fighting my revulsion, I gently turned her body to see her face. She was heavy, rigor mortis already setting in. I'd barely moved her head when I spotted what lay hidden beneath her tangled black hair.
She looked young—twenties, maybe my age? I couldn't be sure. What made my blood run cold was the wound on the back of her head. Her hair was matted with congealed blood, the scalp torn back to reveal shattered bone beneath. A fatal blow, irregular and violent.
And that spot—that exact spot radiating pain—matched the throbbing wound at the back of my own skull.
A horrifying thought crashed over me like an avalanche.
I was the killer.
No, impossible! My first instinct was to run—to get as far from this corpse as possible. If someone found me here, I'd be finished. They'd call me a murderer. The thought gave me strength to struggle to my feet.
But as I found my footing, an even more chilling thought emerged: if I couldn't remember anything, how could I be sure... I wasn't the killer?
What if I had killed her?
What if the wound on my head came from her fighting back?
What if my amnesia was the result of trauma from committing murder?
The thought hit like black lightning, shattering my will. I froze in a half-crouch, paralyzed. The wind carried snowflakes against my face, but I felt nothing. My entire world narrowed to that splash of red and the question that could destroy me.
Who am I?
A victim?
Or... a murderer?
