Cold savaged John.

Freezing wind dissolved his skin like acid, eating through flesh and leaving numbness behind. Each ragged breath stung a terrible trail through his chest and shuddered through his spine. It blasted away all thought, evoking instead a guileless urgency to remove himself from it and find someplace, any place where he could once again experience warmth. He looked around in desperation, but he was lost in shadow.

Slowly, as he stood huddled into himself in his t-shirt and gym shorts, defenseless against the wild flurries of snow, John’s eyes began to adjust to the blackness. Darker, vertical stripes coalesced between lighter spaces. At a height of perhaps five meters, smaller, horizontal stripes branched from the vertical ones and led into smudge-like spaces of dark, almost like negative clouds. Trees. John was looking at what appeared to be oversized Christmas trees. Above was a night sky, and soon John could discern a large, yellowish moon and twinkling stars. Some of these blinked, however, revealing themselves to be watching eyes.

Two of the eyes manifested closer to the ground. Much too close, in fact. They glowed a faint, predatory yellow, growing almost imperceptibly larger until the outline of a canine form materialized from the darkness. A wolf. A white wolf. It was a creature John knew well.

This was Uldwyld. John was in Uldwyld forest.

Setting aside the impossibility of his circumstances, John wrestled with the cold and the panic that had hijacked his mind. His psyche had narrowed to primitive impulse. An instinct he had never before accessed told him, in no uncertain terms, that he was going to die. It told him that if he did not take action, he would be killed and consumed by something higher on the food chain. It told him he must fight, or he must run. Of the two options, however, only one seemed remotely viable.

But to where? He could not possibly outrun a wolf.

As John scrambled for a solution, he became aware of the object in his arms. It was the binder his mother had given him, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Depression. Despite the numb of his arms and chest, he could tell something was different about it. The edges were no longer sharp, but rounded, and rather than the hard-shell of plastic the cover felt more supple, almost like leather. Regardless, it would make a poor weapon against a wolf attack, so it didn’t matter now.

His body shaking madly with the cold, and the silhouette of the wolf stalking ever closer, John forced himself to think. With an effort, he placed himself in the mindset of an early-level character, one who didn’t have godlike power and myriad items to deal with every situation - when the player had to be strategic to survive. Where was his character, Polaris, when John’s father had destroyed his game system? He had been nearing the Uldwyld Ruins, or rather he had found the edges of the Ulwyld Ruins, which John knew because… He had found a partially collapsed building!

But where? Trying to scan his surroundings while also keeping an eye on the wolf, John managed to locate a darker area behind him with a suspiciously structure-like outline. That must be it. Now he just had to get there, get inside and scare the wolf away somehow. If the predator followed him in, John was essentially cutting off his own escape and giving the wolf a nice, cozy ambiance for its meal. Somehow, he had to startle it into flight. What was startling about a fat, uncoordinated loser in a t-shirt, gym shorts and flip flops?

John began edging backward towards the structure, holding the binder out like a shield. His flip-flops were tugged away by the thick snow, leaving his feet bare as he plowed a path backward. They felt completely numb, like clumsy blocks of ice. More than simply numb, however, his body had become sluggish, as though he was trying to force it through freezing water. His breathing too had become slow and labored, and his rattling inhalations failed to satisfy the need for oxygen. It seemed the cold might kill John before the wolf did.

Good riddance to bad rubbish, said the voice at the back of John’s mind.

The wolf maintained the distance between them, following silently at John’s pace as he staggered backward towards the structure. Perhaps the predator also understood the cold would overtake him soon. He would make an easy, frozen meal. A nice johncicle. Again, John forced himself to think. He needed something to warm himself, and he also needed something to scare away the wolf - but he didn’t have anything. He had the binder, which was useless, and there was nothing in his pockets except his phone and maybe a… of course.

John felt like a drunk as he jammed his hand into his hip, trying to find the pocket hole. After several attempts, he managed to get his fingers inside and close them around a small, hard object. Despite the numb of his fingers, he could tell it didn’t feel right. It was the wrong shape. When he groped for the textured wheel that he must flick to spark a flame, it wasn’t there. He couldn’t see it clearly in the dark, but what he now held looked like a smooth, featureless stone in the shape of an egg.

Unwilling, or perhaps unable to deviate from his plan, John wedged the binder beneath his arm, transferred what should have been his lighter to that hand and reached down with his free arm until it brushed a skeletal shrub. He tugged it as he continued to move backward and eventually ripped it from the ground. He was close now, perhaps only ten meters from shelter. Holding the shrub up, he thumbed the stone that should have been his Bic lighter, rubbing futilely at the smooth surface. Nothing happened.

Overcome by desperation, he bashed the stone stupidly into the shrub’s stem. Miraculously, sparks erupted from it and cascaded over the plant, and small flames sprang up across it like an uneven candelabra. A wild thrill filled John as his useless shrub flared into a bright, burning torch, hurling back the shadows and heating him with scant but precious warmth.

A radius of the forest was now bathed in orange glow. John knew, without a doubt, he was in Uldwyld. The wolf lightened from ash gray to its full, arctic white, and its eyes reflected John’s torchlight like burning marbles.

“Fuck off!” John screamed at the creature. “Please just fuck off!”

To his utter shock, the wolf did just that. With a last, assessing glance, it turned and bounded away into the darkness.