The cold struck them not with a gradual creep, but with an immediate, shocking brutality, a sudden, biting force that settled deep into the bones. Arden's breath instantly fled her in white plumes, and her garments, still damp from their previous ordeal, stiffened and froze against her skin, emitting low, brittle sounds with every hesitant movement. Ice began to lace her jacket, her hair, and clung even to the fragile edges of her eyelashes.
"Keep moving," Kael commanded, his voice muffled by the vast emptiness, already forging ahead. His boots cracked heavily upon the virgin snow. "To stand still in this place is to invite the final, permanent rest."
Before them, the Cathedral of Ice rose—a colossal silhouette carved from the harshest, impossible ice, a monument of Gothic architecture reaching into a sky that was not cloudy, but utterly and unnervingly white, like a gaze into an absence of existence. Its walls were of a thickness unknown to mortal structures. Arden pressed onward, each step an agony as her muscles seized and the cold pierced through layers of clothes, through the very skin, down to the marrow.
Amara, too, was afflicted, her form trembling violently, her teeth chattering a frantic rhythm against the chilling air, for she had shared the baptism of the water. "How far must we suffer this torment?" her voice emerged, barely a whisper.
"Half a mile," Kael replied, pointing towards the icy grandeur, "perhaps a lesser distance." They struggled forward, the snow reaching their knees, each footfall a burdensome effort. Yet, despite their toil, the great cathedral seemed to hold its distance, fixed and unmoved, no matter the length of their agonizing trek.
It was Arden who spoke the terrible truth: "It retreats from us. The cathedral moves further away."
Kael halted instantly, turning to gaze back upon their winding path. The footprints they had laboured to create now formed a distinct, cruel curve, ending precisely where they stood. They had achieved but two hundred feet, and yet had travelled nowhere at all. "The Station mocks us," he muttered, the revelation stark and devastating.
Amara, defeated by the truth and the chill, collapsed into the snow. "I cannot continue. I will not walk in circles again. I am too cold to care." Kael hauled her upward, his grip firm. "To sit here is to perish."
"Perhaps death would be a warmer welcome," Amara whispered, her eyes glazed with the onset of hypothermia. "We shall lose more memories," Arden urged, her voice strained, forcing her legs to break the curved line and strike a new path toward the great structure. "You will forget the cause for which we fight."
The cathedral, now perceptibly closer, perhaps granting them a reprieve, gave sight to a figure: a body, prone in the snow, frozen solid. It was a person-shaped cairn of ice, face downward.
"Do not look," Kael warned, attempting to guide her past. But Arden was already kneeling, carefully turning the figure over. It was a woman with Asian features, her expression a final, silent scream of terror frozen eternally upon her face. "Jin-Hwa," the name rose from a forgotten depth of memory. "The surgeon from Station Two. She must have found her way here, only to fall just short of the shelter." Kael's gaze was fixed upon the towering doors. "Perhaps the cathedral is not the safety we seek. Perhaps it is a fate even more grim than freezing."
They pressed on, leaving Jin-Hwa's frozen body to its final rest. More bodies were discovered: two, then three, then five. All frozen. All players Arden recognized from Terminal Zero, those who had been resurrected and sought to continue their journey this far.
"We are all destined to become like them," Amara whispered, "to freeze and resurrect and forget, until nothing of us remains."
"No," Arden asserted, though she did not fully believe the word. "We shall achieve passage."
The cathedral loomed, near now: a hundred feet, then fifty. The doors were immense, ice carved in the semblance of ancient wood, the handles forged from frozen metal. Kael reached them first, and gripping the handle, his hand instantly adhered, the ice bonding skin to metal.
"Do not pull," Arden cried, seizing his wrist. "You will tear the flesh from your hand."
"Then what remains for us to do?"
She drew forth the Codebook, sodden and frozen, its pages stuck together. Forcing it open, she found a blank page, and a pen materialized. The ink flowed sluggishly, already beginning to freeze. She wrote swiftly before the frost could claim the pen completely: The door is warm.
The words were absorbed, and the Codebook grew hot, radiating a warmth that spread through her hands, up her arms, and into her very being. The door warmed, ice melting into steaming rivulets. Kael's hand was freed; the metal handle was now almost hot to the touch. He pulled, and the door opened, unleashing a rush of warm air, a golden light, and the solemn sound of organ music.
They stumbled inside as the door crashed shut behind them. The warmth struck with the force of a blow, and Arden collapsed onto the warm, rough stone floor, her body convulsing in a terrible shaking after such extreme cold.
"What memory was taken?" Kael's voice was close, laced with concern.
Arden sought the missing piece, but found only fog, an empty chasm where something had been. "I cannot say," she whispered. "Something slight, perhaps. Something inconsequential." Yet she knew that every memory held weight; to lose enough fragments was to lose the whole.
She forced herself upright and surveyed the chapel—small, intimate, lined with pews. Stained glass depicted the beautifully suffering forms of saints and martyrs. At the fore stood an altar, white cloth, gold candlesticks, and a cross sculpted from ice.
They were alone. "Where are the others?" Amara asked, rising with caution. "The players who passed inside?"
"Perished," a cold, smooth voice answered from behind the altar. "Or perhaps something worse than death."
A figure rose—a priest, ancient, with robes and hair as white as the snow outside. His face was like marble carved by the wind, and his eyes a pale, terrifying blue, the colour of deep ice. Father Frost.
"Welcome," the priest said, his voice gliding, devoid of human warmth. "Welcome to the Confessional. Here, truth is compulsory, and falsehood is fatal. The single path forward requires honesty." He gestured toward the pews. "Please, be seated. We have matters of great import to discuss."
"We will not sit," Kael declared, his hand instinctively reaching for a phantom weapon. "We shall not partake in your game."
"But you already have," Father Frost smiled, a gentle, awful expression. "You accepted the warmth. Now, the price must be rendered." As he insisted, the air instantly dropped, the unnatural warmth vanished, and the terrible cold returned, worse than the blizzard. They sank into the front pew, devoid of choice.
The moderate warmth returned. "Better," Father Frost approved. "The rules are simple and honest: Each of you shall confess the greatest sin that led you here—the guilt that nourishes the Entity. Confess truthfully, and you may proceed. Lie, and you shall freeze forever, becoming an eternal part of this cathedral."
She found herself in an impossible space, standing in a hallway where ice had recently ruled. A child—a girl of about nine, clad in a purple dress with hair the colour of pale flax—stood in a doorway that should not have been. "Arden! Come play!" the voice called, the very sound fashioned from solid memory. Behind the girl, a fearful red light pulsed, and a distant scream resonated from the chamber beyond.
Kael grasped her wrist, pleading: "Do not venture forth."
But Arden was compelled, moving toward the portal, drawn by the child. The hallway stretched into a faithful replica of her childhood home, the familiar water stain on the ceiling, the crooked portrait, the scent of vanilla and bitter disappointment. "This cannot be real," Amara's voice faded behind her, as if time itself was pulling her back.
She reached the threshold. The child was vanished, leaving only the red glare and the scream. Arden peered in. Her childhood room was now a vast, dark lake, the walls lost to blackness. And floating at its centre was the child, face down, motionless. Without thought, without any measure of time or plan, Arden plunged into the water.
The water was strangely thick and oppressively warm. She swam, seized the girl, and turned her over to reveal her sister's face, pale and lifeless. Dead. Arden began compressions, desperately attempting to force life back into the dead lungs, even as the dark water relentlessly rose, reaching her chest, then her shoulder. The water consumed her mouth, and she tilted her head back for one last, desperate gulp of air before she was entirely submerged.
Under the black surface, her eyes opened. The child's eyes were open too, gazing back. And then the child's lips moved, the accusation clear in the turbulent water: "You let me drown."
Arden struggled, but only bubbles escaped her burning lungs. "Forty-seven seconds," the child continued. "Stop counting. Start acting." The child's small hands gripped her wrists, pulling her downward into the cold, the dark, the absolute absence.
They struck ground. She stood upon a dock, real and weathered, upon Lake Thornwood—but the sky above was a menacing red, and the water an impenetrable black. At the end of the dock sat her younger self, twelve years of age, staring into the water.
Arden approached the girl. "You must scream now," she commanded. Young Arden did not look up. "I find myself unable to do so."
"You must," Arden insisted.
"What if," the girl's voice cracked, "I wish for her to be gone?"
"You do not," Arden replied, kneeling. "I know this, for I am you, ten years hence, and I have hated myself for this single choice. Do not make it. Shout now."
Young Arden raised her tear-filled gaze. "Does the road ahead bring ease?"
"No," Arden admitted. "It brings more failure, deeper hurt, greater loss. But you also persist in trying, and that, too, holds a certain value."
The girl finally looked to the water, where her sister was sinking, and then she let forth a scream that tore through the red sky. "HELP!" The scene fractured, time sped forward: the father plunging in, the sister saved. Young Arden remained, crying and alone on the dock.
"You performed the act," Arden comforted, sitting beside her.
"Yet I still counted the seconds."
"Indeed. But you chose to act over counting. That is the truth that weighs heaviest." The dock dissolved into night.
Then, a voice, her own, older and marked by the ordeal: "You have grasped the final lesson."
Arden turned to face her future self—scarred, wearied, a woman who had seen the end. The future self smiled, a look both sad and knowing. "I starved it. But the price was every connection, every fragment of memory. I secured the victory, yet I forgot why it was necessary to win."
"Then what is the value of your triumph?"
"The value lies in your choice," the scarred woman stated, fading. "You are not me. You are here, now. Trust only the moment. That is sufficient."
The future self vanished, leaving Arden standing alone until a golden light coalesced into a doorway. She passed through, entering a vast, incomprehensible chamber—a space where geometry itself seemed to cause pain to the eye, a kaleidoscope of colours that defied naming, and sounds that bypassed the ear to penetrate the mind. This, she knew, was the very heart of the Entity.
The Entity itself was before her: formless, massive, woven from the fabric of fear, shame, and the count of every second she had hesitated. It communicated its presence not through voice, but by forcing thoughts directly into her consciousness: WELCOME HOME.
"This is not a home, but a prison," Arden replied, producing the Codebook.
YOUR PRISON. YOUR GUILT. YOUR OWN CREATION, the Entity boomed within her mind.
"No," Arden insisted. "Yours. You took my remorse and wrought this weapon from it, and upon it you fed."
I HAVE BUILT NOTHING. YOU OFFERED THE CONSUMPTION, AND I SIMPLY TOOK WHAT WAS GIVEN.
"Then I shall offer no more."
YOU CANNOT. THE GUILT IS BOUNDLESS. THE SHAME IS PERMANENT. YOU SHALL REMAIN, FOREVER, THE CHILD WHO COUNTED FORTY-SEVEN SECONDS.
"Perhaps so," Arden conceded, opening the Codebook to its final, pristine page. "But I am also the woman who continually strives, who fights forward despite the crushing weight of everything. And that is the part you cannot touch, nor consume, nor destroy."
The Entity shifted, its form briefly wavering in an instant of uncertainty. WHAT INTENTION DRIVES YOU?
"To bring this to its destined end." She inscribed two simple words upon the page: I forgive.
The Codebook erupted in a blinding cascade of light. The Entity shrieked—a soundless terror forced into every fiber of existence. For acceptance, for forgiveness, was the poison that brought its death. The massive form shrank, collapsed, dwindling into nothingness.
Arden felt the immediate return of memory, not the pieces she had lost, but a rush of moments forgotten beneath the burden of shame: her sister's laughter before the calamity, her mother's song before the tragic crash. The Entity was gone.
She fell, landing upon soft grass. She awoke to a blue sky, the warm sun, and the distant call of birds—the familiar tranquility of Boston Common. Kael sat up beside her. "We are returned," he whispered. "We have endured."
"What was the price of the final entry?" Arden sought the final missing piece of herself, and then comprehension dawned. "Everything before the Game. My entire life, my childhood, my kin. All of it is gone. Only the horrors of the Game remain with me now."
Kael took her hand, firm and steady. "Then we shall rediscover it. Together." They walked into the city, into the Now. The Game had ended. But the Game never truly dies. The Entity sleeps, waiting for the next opportunity, for fear is eternal, guilt is permanent, and the counting will not cease until one chooses to act instead of to watch. Arden Vale had chosen action over observation, Now over Then. And for that, she had survived. That, she knew, must be sufficient.