The crystalline mounds of icy snow crunched beneath the footfalls of heavy boots as the lone traveller made its way across the desolate frozen tundra. A shrill squawking sound occasionally screeched across the sky as a distant Icediver bird swooped low in a determined attempt to spear its waiting prey with its long, hooked beak. The air was cool and still, not even a whisper of wind dared to blow across the icy landscape that so few creatures called home. The sky above was a pale blue color that was stained with grim clouds, the planets and moons above vaguely visible, shrouded slightly by the thin canvas of clouds that veiled the looming worlds. The traveller continued to make his way across the frozen waste, paying no notice to the far off screeches and cries of the planet’s indigenous inhabitants, his mind focused on a singular goal. The traveller was a tall figure, encased in a suit of grey-blue armor that was coated with a thick layer of frost, though it was of no bother to him as the armor’s internal heat processors kept him at a comfortably warm temperature that refused to be overruled by the frozen planet’s glacial atmosphere. Wiping away a chunk of ice that had settled on his wrist-mounted Information pad with a gloved finger, the traveller keyed in a series of commands and a column of small panels appeared on the digital blue screen. Touching it lightly with his finger, he enlarged one of the panels to full-screen size and studied it closely, examining the display to carefully take in the information once more. Once content with what he was required to do, he switched the Info pad into standby mode and continued with his journey.
The eerie silence of the area wasn’t something that even remotely affected the traveller, he had no fear of such things. Old words, spoken to him by a long dead teacher echoed in his mind; Fear lies within your own misunderstanding of things, he had come to understand. You fear that which you do not know. You must take the object of such dread and grasp it with your own two hands and make it yours. The words had been drilled into him at a young age and he had modelled his own being around them, honing and refining himself to become someone who was a purveyor of fear, never the opposite. He stopped dead in his tracks, his helmet’s on-board sensors beginning to pick up a change in the surroundings. Within moments an all-encompassing blizzard surrounded him, blanketing the area in a violent torrent of ice particles and chill wind. The helmet’s illumination processors activated automatically, layering over the v-shaped visor with a brightly lit blue screen that showed him a slightly unobstructed view of his path ahead, largely ignoring the blizzard that roared all around him and displayed a series of charts and meters on the right hand corner that showed readings of temperature and atmospheric changes, both of which were highly useful in such conditions. The traveller would have been largely invisible within the confines of the blizzard when viewed from beyond it’s ever expanding reach, due to the icy blue shade of his armor. The only part of him that could be seen was the bright blue v-shaped visor that gazed out through the winds like some monstrous, illuminated beast studying its prey.
New story: Winter's End
