Five Hundred Years of Silence
The first sensation was not cold. It was the absence of everything else — no dreams, no sound, no sense of time having passed at all — and then, violently, cold arrived to fill the void. It came like a fist closing around her chest, squeezing the breath she didn't yet know she needed. Elara's eyes snapped open to darkness streaked with red light, and her body convulsed against restraints that no longer made sense to her waking mind.
A klaxon blared somewhere above, muffled, as though drowning in water. Frost had crept across the inside of the pod's curved window, a lattice of white feathers obscuring her view of the world beyond. She tried to move her arm and found it leaden, foreign, as if someone had replaced her limb with a sack of wet sand while she slept. Her fingers, when they finally twitched, felt like someone else's.
*Wake up. Wake up. Wake up.*
The thought looped, frantic, before her mind could form any other words. Needles of pain shot through her joints as the pod's restraint clamps released with a hydraulic hiss, far too sudden, far too rough. She was supposed to wake slowly. She remembered that much — a technician's voice, calm and clinical, explaining the process…
