Bladed ice tears hang in stasis. The air is frozen plasma. Firmaments of debris lie embedded in the atmosphere like dead flies in honey.

He stands in a clearing of crimson stone. The sky is dead and dark. The shadows of broken hills loom behind him.

He sees figures locked in unmoving strife and bullets frozen in the air, blazing scorches of metal trapped in clouds of motion. He hears the promise of explosions hidden in the cracks and crenellations of unceasing seconds.

His lungs swell. They are petrified in mid-scream. No sound can escape his lips, as he is held still in this perpetual moment.

He stands immobile beneath a sky of blood and black clouds, in the company of ice shards that fill the unmoving air like glass raindrops.

Plumes of smoke made smudged and blurry by the sphere of petrified time rise into the sky, the smoldering remains of the place that he once called home. Cold and ghostly unguent turns the air molten.

This is not the first time that he has been frozen here, and it will not be the last. He is forced to this spot, again and again, trapped in this moment, this instance, and it has dug into him and holds him, as if with claws.

If he could turn he would see the ruined city behind him, where seven combatants converge towards a blade made of dark metal. He would see where the shadow sword has smelted into the shattered blood stone of the earth, a sliver of dark meteorite driven into wounded ground. He can smell its iron aroma, the burning meat scent of fallen worlds. He can feel the sticky wind on his face, and he tastes the salt cloud of blood in the air.

He can feel and hear and see, but he cannot move. All he can do is watch, and wait.

Another chance will come to escape these temporal bonds, but it will not come soon, and that chance will not be for him. He has become a monument – a spectator.

His mind recalls the time before, when he stood in the chamber of necrovats and angel's bodies, a nightmare of blood ice and diseased oil.

He remembers the conflicts and the lives lost, and he sees fallen comrades stuck in dying momentum. He sees his own memories as they revolve around him, an orbit of regret.

The effluvia of dreams and the dread filigree of a world that leaks shadow crumble around the unseen walls of the tempest clearing. He sees the inevitability of the end.

Worse, he feels her as she moves around walls that have become intangible and passes through sluggish doorways. He hopes that the outcome will be different, that the storm will not rip everything he cares about asunder. He hopes not to lose all that he has fought so hard to protect.

But there is no way to escape, and there is no warning or sign that he can send. All he can do is think back through the revolving halls of his mind and recall the moments that led to this one, this final and dreadful place, where he stands frozen at the edge of a dying world.