Precipice

I hear the water long before I reach the peak.
It’s a gentle tune that curls over the wall of ice, like a twinkling melody promising of something long lost, maddeningly trickling down the slope until it finds its way into my ears. It’s dizzying. It’s delicious. I would say I instantly perk up at the sound, but that wouldn’t be true: at this point the cold has crawled upwards far beyond my hands; it’s wrapping around my arms, ensnaring my neck, choking my eyes, blinding my ears, and it feels as if my heart has already been buried in the very ice I’m dragging myself across.
It’s cold, so, so very cold. Even the thought of lifting my leg to take another step – only to inevitably collapse again, so it seems – sends chills reverberating through my hollow carcass. What do I even feel anymore? I’ve come so far, for what?
Every now and then there’s a stray thought crosses my mind I can’t ignore. It’s a deafening whisper that slices into my head more vividly than the screaming winds; a searing caress that unrelentingly strokes at my mind, reminding me that there will always be the one consolation. I try to ignore it. I try to shield myself from the creeping cold outside just as I do from the numbing warmth within.
Only when I close my eyes do I hear it again. Except this time, it’s a lullaby, and the whisper is singing softly to me. Who knows how long I spend there, listening out for that lifeline, hanging on as if nothing else means anything. Part of me is silently crying at me to stay afloat. Yet all I hear is the voice of the thought, its tender notes like droplets of water, sucking away the scars of pain and fear as they trace along my skin. So I let go, and drown myself in the warming embrace of emptiness.
Drowning… in water?
In warmth?
And feeling rushes into me, a wave of feeling and sensation, and coughing and spurting and I’m alive, I’m awake, I’m alight with the raw intensity of feeling –
“Hey, he’s awake!”
I must be imagining things. My eyes can’t open. My mouth –
“No way, he’s still alive?”
And then I’m sucking in breath after breath, and all that runs through my mind is that air has never tasted so incredible –
“Hey, hey, you’re alright now. Everything will be alright.”
And finally my eyes unlock, and I’m squinting at the relieved smile of a human face.
“Just take a moment. Oh man, you were almost out of it. Don’t worry, you’re safe here.”
…Here?
I prop myself up. My breath hitches when I realise my fingers are lying on soil. Soil! All around me is grass, and green, and life, all sights I’ve only dreamed of, sights that belong to another time. And just ahead is the precipice, jagged ice jutting out like spears, and below that… a waterfall.
”Hey, you want water?”
A waterfall.
It’s almost too much to drink in.