The world around me began to shift as the snow stopped falling and the grey sky cracked like a mirror dropped on stone, the pieces falling away into darkness and leaving nothing behind but empty space.
The house with the smoking chimney dissolved into shadows, and the frozen pond turned to black glass beneath a sky that no longer existed.
I stood in the middle of nothing, suspended in a void that had no floor and no ceiling and no walls, and then something new began to form around me like paint spreading across a blank canvas.
A memory took shape, pulling me into its current like a river dragging a drowning man downstream.
I was standing in a dirt courtyard behind a crumbling stone building with walls that were stained yellow and brown from years of neglect. The windows were boarded shut with rotting wood, and the door hung crooked on its hinges, frozen in a permanent state of collapse.
