A Background Character’s Path to Power Chapter 201: A Loneliness Beyond Cold

W-where am I?

The thought surfaced sluggishly, like a bubble rising through tar. My vision swam, the world a bleached sar of white.

Snow?

No, it was too bright, too empty to be simple snow.

Hmm?

Then I rembered everything:

- The Shroud’s maw yawning wide, the chilling plunge into its core.

- Lantern’s Glim, Shared Burden, and nder’s Paradox working in tandem, the Crescent Mirror’s Mirror Reversal effect channeling through its very essence.

- Every power, every last drop of aura, had been poured into that single, desperate gambit.

I’m not dead, am I?

A knot of unease tightened in my gut. I tried to reach out, to summon the familiar, comforting screen of the System.

No ’ding’, no holographic prompt, nothing.

Just the vast, unsettling silence of this strange void.

Thrummm.

Then, the oppressive white began to waver, softening at its edges.

It thinned, revealing spectral hints of jagged peaks and swirling, ceaseless blizzards beyond. The formless expanse gave way, flickering, to vast mountains, perpetually cloaked in snow, battered by a howling wind I could almost feel.

My hands clenched around nothing.

This isn’t right.

The plan had been ticulous: allow the Shroud to ensnare , let it believe victory was absolute, even guide it to drag into its very core. The Exorcist’s Eye had already been awakening when the world tilted sideways.

I clearly rember its purifying light building behind my eyes, a mont away from deploynt, my focus absolute, but then, my consciousness swayed violently. And then...

Then... I was here.

...Ok, let’s calm down and assess the situation.

I looked around, or rather, I simply saw. My vision wasn’t restricted to forward, or even peripheral. It was a full, unsettling 360-degree panorama, as if I possessed eyes on every surface, perceiving all at once.

Am I a bird or what?

The thought was strange, yet the sensation itself, this boundless perception, was oddly comfortable, utterly native to this new ’body’ I was in.

Then ti began to warp.

The scene around , the endless, desolate blizzard, flickered.

Days bled into weeks, weeks into seasons, seasons into years.

The sa cycles repeated - white and wind, stark and silent.

The sa process, a brief jolt of awareness, an unchanging landscape, repeated itself, over and over.

A cold certainty settled in my mind.

I wasn’t dead at all.

I was probably experiencing the Shroud’s past. Its mories, laid bare before , raw and unfiltered.

It seed this thing, this entity of ice and mist, was born as a natural phenonon within the blizzard itself, a nascent pure aura beast coalescing from the raw energies of this frozen waste.

At its beginning, it was just... a watcher. Unable to move, unable to interact, a newborn observer in a world of endless white.

And, years passed like blurs.

The formless entity began to stir, a slow, deliberate expansion. It gained agency, drifting and swirling freely with the blizzard, a living part of the driving mist.

Another dozen years or so blurred past like flicked pages.

Then, a shift.

Through the swirling snow, I saw them: the first new lifeforms.

Strange creatures, beasts with bodies that vaguely resembled the skeletal structures of long-dead prey, moving with an eerie, silent grace through the snow. They were the first flicker of ’sentience’ in this desolate world, beyond the nascent Shroud itself.

And then, another new sight, looming out of the white: the Eclipse Keep.

My breath hitched. I recognized it instantly, the jagged silhouette of its spires and walls a familiar horror.

I felt a primal urge from the Shroud’s perspective, a nascent attempt to reach out, to speak to these new creatures.

But there were no vocal cords, no language, only a formless desire.

Through that invisible connection, I felt it: a profound loneliness, a vast, empty boredom stretching across an existence that had known nothing but endless white.

But as more ti blurred, the boredom shifted.

A dawning awareness blood: it had strange powers. Powers it was only just beginning to comprehend.

It all happened in a simple and coincidental way.

The snow was howling around it, a blizzard raging. A human, cloaked and bent against the wind, stumbled directly through the formless mist.

For a fractured instant, a kaleidoscope of alien images, sounds, and emotions surged through the Shroud’s nascent awareness: a flickering fire(hearth), the warmth of a distant laugh, the scent of cooked at - a glimpse of a human’s mories.

I watched, fascinated, as the Shroud finally found its reprieve from the endless boredom.

The fleeting contacts beca more frequent, more intentional.

It would drift near the Keep during every blizzard, drawn by the faint echoes of life and thought that bled through the stone.

It was learning, testing the boundaries of its strange new senses.

As I witnessed its tentative forays, the scattered pieces of the puzzle began to click into place in my mind.

The old records of Ashenfang Whitefall always spoke of the Keep’s early years as uneventful, but later chronicles ntioned a disturbing phenonon: people caught in the blizzards reporting vivid hallucinations.

A crucial detail, one that had always bothered , now stood out in stark relief: the records clearly stated there were no casualties from these strange occurrences. No one was ever hard by these phantom sights and sounds.

Now, seeing the Shroud in its nascent state, experinting with its evolving senses and powers, the truth beca clear.

While it sought to understand the mories of the Keep’s inhabitants, it had, unknowingly, unleashed another of its nascent abilities - illusions.

The creatures of ice and mist, the comforting warmth of a non-existent hearth, the loved ones seen through the storm – they were all the unintentional side effects of the Shroud’s attempts to connect, to alleviate its profound loneliness.

The early hallucinations weren’t malicious; they were simply an unrefined manifestation of its illusionary power.

But this unwitting power soon led to its harsh discovery through an unfortunate incident.

One day, during a particularly fierce blizzard, the Shroud drifted too close to a lone figure, a young woman huddled against a crumbling wall.

Driven by that familiar, yearning desire for connection, it reached out, focusing all its nascent energy on projecting a vision of warmth, of comfort, of what it perceived as ’ho’ from her own mories.

Instead, she crumpled.

A low, keening cry tore from her throat, swallowed by the wind. Her hands clawed at the snow as if trying to bury herself in it. The Shroud pulsed in confusion, its mist coiling tight.

Why wasn’t she comforted?

Then I saw what she saw.