As she slowly closed the distance between the room she’d awakened in, and the pale light at the end of the passage, Rebecca could finally see that the end of the hall led to a spiral staircase which lead upwards, and from which the dim gloom leaked down from above. Getting to the end of the hall, and the base of the stairs, she was surprised to see that even the steps themselves were much different than any she’d ever encountered before. Each step was only about a hand’s height taller than the previous one, but each step was more a platform than what one would call a normal step, taking two or three of her strides to reach the next ‘step’ up.

For a few moments, she tried to fathom the purpose behind such an odd design for steps, but her mind couldn’t supply any logical reason that she was satisfied with. It wasn’t more efficient, as it simply required more walking before taking a step up. In the end, all she could do was chalk it up as another extremely strange bit of architecture whose purpose was completely foreign to her.

The allure of the light, even as dim as it was, was too much to allow her to stand and ponder the reasoning for too long, as she found herself drawn slowly upwards in search of its elusive warmth. This place, wherever or whatever this place was, gave off a subtle chill that slowly drifted into the very core of a person, and she was anxious to get out into the light to try and shake off the overwhelming oppressiveness as much as possible. With one slow step after another, she counted the platforms up – two hundred and seventy-two – before she finally emerged out onto the rooftop of a massive tower, overlooking a scene of such wonder that her knees quivered, buckled, and gave away; causing her to sit and simply stare out at the landscape around her.

The first thing that caught her eyes was the deep, dark purple-violet sky that seemed void of all clouds, sun, moon, or stars – and how high up in it she was! The tower that she was in rose majestically above a massive structure that her mind could only refer to as a castle, which in turn was perched atop a massive mountain peak overlooking everything around.

In the far distance, a huge river seemed to circle and encompass the world, giving the impression that she was staring out across the horizon of a huge island – or perhaps even a continent – to Rebecca! If one could climb high enough, and look out from the proper vantage, would Australia, even as massive as it is, perhaps have a similar view? The height was dizzying, and the wind which howled and blew across the rooftop was icy cold, instantly turning her breath to deep wisps of fog and making it hard to breath – but the view was so spectacular that she couldn’t tear herself away from it to head back inside for the relative safety of the chilled castle.

Crawling on her hands and knees to turn – her legs were too weak from the shock to even pretend to support her – she looked out across a vast, frozen domain. A massive crystal bridge arched with gold, majestically crossed one point of the river – or ocean – that encircled everything, and disappeared into the horizon. Immediately before the bridge was what could only be called a massive dark forest of black, twisted trees, that seemed to manifest the nightmares of every ‘lost in the evil woods’ story ever told. Dividing the remaining landscape into a spidery web of smaller segments, was two massive rivers which seemed to flow lazily across the plains before dumping into a large lake in the center, which was filled with glacier that constantly crashed together and churned under the turbulent crosscurrents caused by the intersection of the two rivers.

The view was majestic and surreal, and completely foreign to anything that she’d ever seen on any show, documentary, or image of Earth. Wherever she was, whatever this frozen place was, Rebecca was certain that she was no longer anywhere near the place that she’d always called home. Trembling, and not just from the penetrating cold, she forced herself to crawl back down the steps towards the chilled darkness which lingered below.

Feeling her strength ebbing from the endless chill that had crept into her very bones, Rebecca focused solely on crawling down the platforms one at a time, in search of the chill warmth which the castle darkness provided. As she neared the hallway at the bottom, and the feeble warmth slowly began to leech away the frozen ice in her veins, she finally noticed that the colored lines at the edge of her vision had went down. The red line, which she assumed was probably her health, had fallen to less than half its original length, and the green line – which she wasn’t certain what it represented – was down to a dangerously low level and flashing at her. Only the blue bar, which she assumed represented her mana seemed to remain full, taunting the others my majestically reaching much further than they could aspire to at the moment.

Exhausted, frozen, and with her mind reeling from what she’d just seen, Rebecca slowly crawled along the gloomy hallway until she could once more see the opening to the room she’d awoke in. With the last of her strength, she crawled back into the bed, wormed her way into the center of the covers and pulled as many over herself as she could, before once more drifting off to a restless, nightmare-filled slumber.