We reach the End of the World half-frozen, snow-blind, the chasms in our fellowship torn wide and treacherous.

We lack the heart to raise our voices above the snowbound crunch of feet. There’s nothing left to say that’s worth fighting the gale which tears words from our lips, the wind a predator in the icefields, howling as it flenses our flesh and leaves our hope to die in the wastes.

Once, we five shared a vision; now, all we will share is an icy grave.

Then the Vault rises before us.

I hear my companions’ voices raised for what seems the first time in an eternity of frost; they would be crying if the tears did not freeze on their cheeks. Our journey, all these months, the prophet promised us this catharsis.

The culmination of our quest, the means to save our home.

I do not weep. My heart beats, driving my flesh and my pack onward with fresh vigour into the lee of the Vault, shelter from the storm.

Frostbitten fingers and sodden wood conspire against our warmth, but I do not offer my aid. My brother and I have not seen eye-to-eye for five hundred miles.

The Vault at the End of the World beckons me, a sheer cliff of ice riven by a single vertical crack. This is what we came all this way for, at the word of the Gods, as foretold by prophecy.

But Gods speak in riddles, and prophecy is bitter like the wind. I do not dare hope that our salvation lies within.

Step by step.

Heartbeat by heartbeat.

The Vault towers over me and for a moment I fear this is where I die, alone in all ways that matter. Colder than death, a fool of prophecy.

I raise a fist and strike the eternal cliff.

It yields.

In hope and terror and resignation I watch as the Vault tears itself open. It should grind like an avalanche, not crunch like a thousand snowdeep footsteps all at once.

Within lies a void, naught but slick, cold walls.

Empty.

The prophet laughs in the face of my anger. She who is God-touched, she who drew us into the ice.

“What did you expect to find?” she says, her old bones cadaverous in her furs.

I have no answer. Magical talismans? Ancient relics to drive back the encroaching night? Something to make all this worthwhile.

I say so.

She shakes her head. “Foolish boy. The Vault does not give, it takes.”

I would know fear, if my veins were not already ice.

One by one, we tear out our hearts.

We pack them, still beating, in what furs we can spare. We stow them in the void and tell each other it is for the best. The Vault closes on our sacrifice.

The firewood is forgotten now, for we do not feel the cold that rimes our flesh. We do not fear the march of death, nor doubt our course.

And when the world demands we feel nothing but the ice in our veins, we no longer fear the judgement of our hearts.

Locked in our icy tomb, we huddle together for what warmth we have.

We - the hearts left behind, when our heartless flesh marched to war - shiver in the ice at the End of the World, warmed only by our communal despair. We imagine ourselves still human; we fashion ourselves spectral limbs and clothe ourselves in the aspect of the children we once were.

Oh, such innocence, to believe our greatest betrayal would come from without!

A peal of bells pierces our dreams.

We feel the warming of the air. Joyful laughter, slip-shod dancing feet that belong anywhere but here.

We long to cry out, to beg these strangers for aid; fleshless, we lack the voice to join their song. Yet their voices rise up in harmony intertwined, and the eternal Vault melts away.

They lift us five huddled souls gently from the ice; they wrap us in fresh scarlet robes, and for a time, our sleep is undisturbed.

We wake to the scent of grass, an absence of the bone-deep cold that brought our own flesh low.

The caravan is at rest, their camp alive in the early evening light. Our rescuers sit in scattered groups, red robes grass-stained as they talk in gentle tones.

They do not shy away when we rouse each other, when we warm the limbs we no longer have in the light of their company.

It’s not long before a man joins us, his face a mouthless mask of white porcelain.

He tells us of their pilgrimage, to recover those lost to the Vault. “There’s a place for you here,” he says, gesturing to the warmth of the caravan.

We confer inwardly, five hearts compressed into a single soul by our long confinement. “We must know,” we say, our voices intermingled, “what about our flesh? Did they reach home?”

His mask shifts, his shoulders tense.

“To discard one’s own heart is a terrible sin,” he says at last. “Do not ask me this.”

A song breaks out at the campfire’s edge, a masked man playing a long fiddle joined by three others singing words unknown.

Have we not suffered enough?

In the arms of this community we may find comfort. We may travel and see many roads beyond the ken of our traitorous flesh.

We could heal our hearts, and learn to grow together. A new start, full of possibility.

But still we must know.

The man sighs. “No heartless act will ever come to any good.”

“They returned as immortals”, he says, “three hundred years ago.”

“Still the Five reign, merciless. They have no hearts to restrain them, no warmth in their blood to recall why they abandoned you.”

We falter, then, aghast. The world forced us to doubt our course, and our flesh chose to excise the very organ of that doubt.

“We do not blame you,” says the man. His hand is alive, reassuring against our spectral flesh. “You have no obligation to the dead.”

If we had the heart to turn our backs on injustice, we would never have been entombed.

We spend an evening in the glow of the fire, dancing like children on unsteady legs, basking in the love between these strangers.

And when the rising sun warms our intangible limbs and we gather ourselves for the journey Home, our new friends walk beside us.

Our treasonous flesh once feared our judgement, and now we burn with it.

We will remind them what it is to feel.