The wind howled as the visibly hurt JohnWillStab trudged through the snow, behind him, he dragged a small bag of things he managed to take before every home became buried under several meters of snow.

Mostly alcohol.

It was exclusively alcohol.

The thin flakes of snow clung to John's entire body like sharp, painful stickers.

"It's been a week already..." he mumbled to himself, John couldn't even summon arachnophobia to share his loneliness with.

In the distance, a grey tower pierced the otherwise level expanse of white.

"A tower?" he asked, deciding the landmark was interesting enough to investigate.

After what easily felt like an hour of walking, John finally reached the frosted rock of the tower which presumably housed only time-frozen dolls.

Its base must have been far below the snow, as what John entered was merely one of its windows.

"Thank Lorb I can't feel the cold as an undead..." he remarked.

John started saying "Thank Lorb" in some failed attempt to popularize the phrase.

The inside of the tower looked cold and sterile as if it was made from concrete and steel.

There were no floors or levels to the tower, only endless stairs going down and up.

John breathed a sigh.

"Guess I should check out the top, maybe I'll see something up there..." he thought, shadow-stepping himself and his bag up the stairs until he reached a mound of snow marking where the stairs would have reached the top of the tower.

Without further hesitation, John began digging through the hardened snow with his pick.

After a while of digging, John eventually broke through the hard layer of snow and ice, reaching the highest structure in the surrounding area.

Even the mountains paled in comparison to the colossal tower.

"Nothing..." he remarked, not finding anything other than his quicky disappearing footsteps.

Disappointed with his findings, John decided to explore the lower levels of the tower, after all, he didn't want to risk sleeping for fear of waking up frozen still, this sense of paranoia left him with more than enough time to explore.

As John descended further and further down into the tower, he slowly realized something was off.

JohnWillStab sniffed the air.

"Is that... food?!"

With no time to spare, JohnWillStab jumped down into the dark abyss, intending to shadow-step before splattering onto the ground below.

That's when it came into view, a fire with a pot of what looked like soup over it.

"IT IS!"

He shadow-stepped into a poorly lit corner of the bottom floor and quickly sprinted towards the pot of food.

"WARM FOOD! I NEVER THOUGHT I'D SEE THE DAY!" he exclaimed.

As John began to drink the soup directly from the pot, he finally began to question the source of the fire and food.

He looked around only to be met with the shocked face of an older man.

He wore a grey-green robe and had long, wispy, grey hair and a beard.

"..."

"Who are you?" he asked.

JohnWillStab almost jumped at the sound of a voice other than his own.

"Oh - um- ehh, I'm JohnWillStab!" he exclaimed, placing the pot aside.

The man continued to glare at John, dumbfounded.

John stood up and patted his clothes clean off the snow.

"It's good to come across somebody out here!" he exclaimed, turning to face the old man.

"What's your name?" he asked.

After several seconds, the still-confused old man replied.

"My name is Sonorch," he explained.

John nodded before extending a hand towards the man, Sonorch shook it and noticed it was eerily cold.

"Uhm... I'm sorry but... why... are you here?" asked the old man.

John shrugged.

"Well, this tower kind of sticks out like a sore thumb in the wasteland above," he remarked.

The old man shook his head.

"I'm asking..."

"How you managed to escape my world-freeze spell," he explained.

In a flash, JohnWillStab drew his daggers.

"ARE YOU THE BASTARD THAT DID THIS?!" he demanded.

The old man breathed a sigh.

"If you kill me, you'll never be able to unfreeze everything," he said without any hint of fear in his voice.

"Are you going to unfreeze everything?" John asked.

The old man nodded.

"Of course, I just need a little more time..." he explained.

He cracked a strangely sombre smile.

"Don't worry about all the snow, it'll disappear as soon as I release the spell."

It took John several seconds to put his weapons away.

He folded his arms.

"Alright, what the hell is this about?" he asked.

The old man shrugged.

"I'm not sure why you're here if that's what you're asking..." he explained.

"My spell simply allows me to stretch any point in time endlessly, with the side effect of everything slowly freezing."

The old man scratched his chin.

"In your time, I have been casting this spell several times a second, my stay never exceeds one month..."

John squinted.

"How long were you here for?" he asked.

The old man shrugged.

"Maybe... a year... or two?" he speculated, not fully certain himself.

"And what, do you just sit around and eat soup?" John asked.

The old man looked into the fire.

"Not exactly..."

The old man gestured to a pile of snow against one of the walls of the room.

In the pile of snow lay the body of a man with a massive hole in his torso, inside the hole was what looked like a bolt of lighting, as still as almost everything else in the world.

The red liquid from within the body stained the snow to look like a morbid rendition of a Japanese flag.

The man wore a black, sleeveless leather jacket and shades.

His hair was a light-green mohawk.

His entire body was covered in tattoos and piercings from head to toe.

His expression was one of shock and pain.

"Holy shit, here I thought I looked like a freak!" John exclaimed with a laugh.

He moved over to observe the body, what looked like a cleanly cut hole turned out to be a roughly torn wound.

"Still, nice work with the kill, this guy kind of looks like he had it coming."

Sonorch clicked his tongue.

"That is my son..."

"..."

"On second glance... he looks like a nice lad..." John said, nodding to himself.

The old man breathed a sigh.

"When this spell wears off, my son will die." the man said plainly.

John was busy poking the pointy green mohawk, the tips of which snapped off at the gentlest of nudges.

"He looks pretty dead to me," John said, still unable to take the dead slash dying man seriously.

Sonorch looked into the fire again.

"No, even if you were to be decapitated, your head would survive for several seconds, my son is still alive, I can see the glint of life in his eye-" the old man stopped speaking as he turned around and saw his son now had one of his fingers placed in his nose.

John stood beside him looking completely innocent, avoiding eye contact at all cost.

"Anyway, nice tower you got here..." he remarked.

The old man stared at John with a wry expression.

"Could you please not play with my son's body...?" the old man asked through gritted teeth.

John nodded.

"Right, sorry!" he nodded again.

The man cleared his throat.

"Like I said, I can see it in his eyes! With my magic, I have kept my son alive for this long, but I feel that this is my last chance... My last fraction of a second before he truly dies..."

He looked back and saw that his son was now showing the middle finger with his tongue out.

"SERIOUSLY! CUT THAT OUT!" the old man demanded.

John lifted both hands in defeat.

"Sorry, sorry! I was just putting him back to how he was!" John explained.

The old man continued to glare at John until he took two long steps away from his son.

"Please continue..."

Reluctantly, the man resumed his explanation.

"That's all, soon, my spell will run out and my son will truly die."

JohnWillStab folded his arms, as in the corpses.

Then he folded his own.

"Look, gramps, your kid is dead, get over it." he shrugged.

The old man breathed an annoyed sigh.

"Look here, he literally isn't!" Sonorch exclaimed.

"If time was flowing, his blood would be flowing!" he exclaimed.

"Out of his body," John added.

"His organs would still be operating!" Sonorch argued.

"For a fraction of a second while they get fried by the lightning...." John explained.

"You should stop making up definitions for what death is," John advised.

"But he IS still alive!" Sonorch cried.

John remained silent.

"What next?" he asked.

Sonorch looked up to John uncertainly.

"Are you going to freeze the world for a couple thousand years again because of the five-second rule?" he asked.

"Then you might as well freeze it for a few more minutes since, who knows, maybe his ghost is chilling here!" he continued in a mocking tone.

"Maybe you should keep this going, I mean, his brain could still have some activity, just a single active neuron counts as alive, right?"

John was getting progressively more upset as he spoke.

Sonorch jumped to his feet, stomping over to John and grabbing him by the collar.

At a loss for words, Sonorch opted to punch John in the face, leaving a large, bruised mark where his fist met John's cold, icy skin.

The punch was surprisingly strong considering how frail the old man looked, it managed to knock the admittedly defenceless John to the ground.

Instead of being quiet or retaliating, John cracked a smile.

"Say, if it's the electricity in his brain you're after, why don't you just pop a few batteries up his-"

Sonorch picked John off the ground and pressed him against a wall, roughing up his previously neat hair and clothes.

"What about necromancy? Would that do the trick?" John asked, a dishonest smile concealing his confused anger.

"SHUT UP!" Sonorch demanded; he wasn't even paying attention to John's words anymore.

After all, what did this JohnWillStab know about losing someone close to you, if he was in Sonorch situation, surely he would have stooped even lower, desperately trying to keep the person alive, stopping at nothing to keep even the thinnest, bleakest of illusions.

JohnWillStab shadow-stepped behind Sonorch, planting a single, powerful blow to his back.

The old man fell to the cold ground with a loud thump.

Sonorch didn't say anything as he slowly stumbled back to his feet.

"Why don't you talk to him if he's alive?" John asked.

"Will he ever go meet anybody he knows?"

"Eat his favourite food?"

"Process a single thought?"

"Feel a single thing?"

It seemed as if Sonorch gave up on standing up and instead fell to his knees before the middle-finger showing corpse of his child.

"Why...?"

"Why can't you just let me say goodbye to my son in my own time...?"

He gritted his teeth, his speech getting harder and harder to understand.

"This... exception aside... you wouldn't even notice me..." he remarked.

John noticed the clear drops of eye-sweat falling to the ground below Sonorch's wrinkly face.

John breathed a sigh, walking back to the corpse and returning his facial expression and hands to their normal state.

"Being dead is best left to corpses, not people, even if they're grieving," John said, looking at the old man who spent god knows how long in this hellscape, convincing himself a lump of still, unmoving, unthinking flesh was his son.

He smiled.

“And as an undead, I have just taken it upon myself to act in for your son and kick this retarded idea of yours out of your thick skull!”