Saints Of Satan Chapter Nine

I stumbled across the never ending world of white, droplets of velvet blood frozen on my cracked lips, pain racking my body with every step. Yet there was no pain on the very Earth or the depths of hell that could have torn my thoughts from mourning Maria.
There had been little I could do by way of burial, and after a day that could have lasted a lifetime for all I cared, I had drawn Maria’s eyelids over unseeing eyes, and lay her down in the icy hard ground beneath the boulder she had died beneath.
Countless hours had passed, and I had ignored my body’s cries for rest, the agony the sun’s rays bore into my flesh, and carried on through the raging blizzards that ravaged the land about me. Life no longer held meaning; the woman I loved had been taken from me in an instant in a manner unfair to the life she had lived.
Days passed, and by luck alone I collapsed by the side of one of the mountains, its huge expanse protecting me from the sun’s rays that were to come in an expanse of bliss shadow.
Fatigue had forced me to ground to a halt, my meaningless struggle to battle through the land put to an end. Tears would no longer come to me, frozen still in their ducts, the heat from my body useless in comparison to the climate of the devilish land.
As I lay still beneath the great expanse of snow covered rock, I felt my life begin to seep away into the snow, the cold sucking me dry of all heat, my very life force seeping away into the icy flakes. My mind was clouded, the outside world torn aside, my eyes glazed as thoughts of Maria and the clan and all things that had been taken from me flashed through my head. The brilliant memories of times long ago tantalised me and brought about anew waves of sorrow as realisation that I could never witness them again coursed through me.
I was only just clinging onto life, when I was discovered.
Indescribable pain racked my head, and it was only as I had been dragged from the thin layer of snow that had accumulated on me that I realised I was being held.
I had no feeling of the strong hands grasping me, my entire body numbed beyond measure by the desperate cold.
Somehow managing to gather the strength, I cracked my eyes open, wincing as the ice about them broke. A blurred face whirled into focus, and then disappeared entirely as I blacked out.