Chương 100: First Snow

Lloyd stepped out of the building, and the moment the doors closed behind him with a quiet, mechanical hiss, the cold, bone-deep air of an early winter morning hit him full in the face. He hunched his shoulders, pulled up the collar of his coarse black hoodie, and paused for a moment on the top step, letting his eyes adjust to the dim, diffused light of day after so many hours spent inside that sterile, faceless building.

Turning around, he saw the Attendant waving to him through the glass doors, her stern face softened for once by a light, almost sympathetic smile, nothing like the businesslike detachment with which she'd led him through the corridors.

The two guards at the entrance, frozen on either side of the massive doors like stone statues, kept following him with that same familiar, heavy, unkind look — the one they probably gave everyone who walked out of there without a triumphant gleam in their eyes and without a guild badge on their chest.

Pulling his phone from his pocket with fingers already numb from the cold, he clumsily unlocked the screen and found a couple of missed calls from his sister and his father, followed by a short message from his sister sent the day before, one he still hadn't opened. Lifting his gaze slightly, he looked at the numbers in the corner of the screen and froze for a moment, not immediately grasping what they meant.

"9: 07, December fifth. I can't believe it — I was out for almost four days." He raised his head, looking up at the low sky, swollen with leaden clouds stretching over the rooftops in a dreary gray sheet without a single break, without a single glimmer of sun, and let out a slow, tired breath, watching the small cloud of vapor rise and dissolve somewhere in that gloomy expanse above, as if it were carrying away the last scraps of strength still left inside him. — All for nothing.

His voice came out hoarse, cracked, as though he hadn't used it in an eternity, as though his throat were lined with sandpaper. Lloyd set off for home along a long, winding route, his boots striking dully against the frost-covered asphalt, and with every breath a puff of white vapor escaped his mouth, even though the first snow of the year still hadn't fallen, and the whole town stood bare, frozen, caught in a tense, silent wait for real winter to arrive.

Familiar houses from his childhood drifted past — peeling paint on the shutters, crooked fences, bent lampposts at whose base the frozen ground had long since lost its last traces of green — all things he'd seen a thousand times over the years and had almost stopped noticing, so worn into the landscape that they'd become nearly invisible. But today, for some reason, every detail caught his eye, as if bidding him farewell, as if the town itself were watching him with silent reproach.

"And here I am, after everything I said to Dad, coming back empty-handed. Just wonderful. I never doubted you, Lloyd."

He deliberately chose the longer route, the one that curved past the old mill and ran alongside the empty lot overgrown with frost-stiffened grass that crunched underfoot with every step — today he wanted to take as long as possible getting home, to stay alone with his thoughts just a little longer before he had to look his family in the eye and find words he simply didn't have, words that could somehow justify four lost days and a complete, unqualified failure.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation. After a few minutes of unhurried walking, he came out onto the road, where to his left the view opened up onto his achingly plain, unremarkable little town — low rooftops, thin trails of smoke rising from a few chimneys and dissolving into the same gray, joyless sky, roofs dusted with frost glinting with a dull, barely visible silver sheen.

Lloyd stopped, shoved his hands into his pockets, looked up at that dreary sky, breathed out another cloud of vapor, and, without quite realizing it, closed his eyes in exhaustion, feeling the weight of the past few days — all those trials, conversations, disappointments — settle onto his shoulders all at once, pressing him down with an almost physical heaviness. But then he felt something cold and weightless touch his nose, then his cheek, his forehead, the back of his hand poking out from his sleeve.

He was so worn out, so lost in his own heavy thoughts, that he didn't open his eyes right away, as though his eyelids had turned to lead, as though his body simply refused to react to anything else after everything he'd been through. When he finally did open them, slowly, reluctantly, he saw something white drifting down softly onto his sleeve.

It looked like some tiny medal the sky had awarded him for all his suffering — a perfect six-pointed star, carved seemingly out of nothing, out of the air itself, settling onto the coarse black fabric of his hoodie before slowly, almost reluctantly, melting away. It was a snowflake.

A second later another landed on him, then another, followed by a whole scattering of the same tiny white sparks, swirling through the air so slowly, so gently, so weightlessly, as if they didn't answer to the laws of this world at all, as if time itself had slowed down around him for a moment, stretching out just enough to let him make out each individual flake.

Lloyd instinctively spread his arms, splaying his chilled fingers, and tried to catch as many as he could, like a child seeing snow for the very first time, forgetting for a moment both his exhaustion and the bitterness of his failure and the difficult conversation waiting for him.

"First snow." Something warm, almost forgotten, stirred inside him, breaking through the exhaustion and the bitterness of the past few days, and for a moment the whole world around him seemed a little brighter, a little quieter, as if these flakes, settling onto the ground, were covering not just the frozen asphalt and the empty lot behind him, but his own scattered, exhausted thoughts as well, granting him, for one brief instant, something like peace.

After standing there like that for a couple of minutes, head tilted back toward the sky, watching the snowflakes land one after another on his face and melt instantly, leaving behind a faint, damp coolness trickling down his cheeks in tiny cold drops, he finally steeled himself, gave his head a shake as if to chase away the trance, and pulled out his phone, feeling that familiar, heavy weight building inside him again.

"Well, better to get it over with than drag it out and suffer." He found the familiar name in his contacts, paused for a moment, staring blankly at the screen, his thumb hovering right over the green call button, and then finally pressed it, like jumping into cold water off a cliff.

A long ring sounded, unexpectedly loud in his ear against the surrounding silence, but before a second one could even finish, the person on the other end had already picked up — as if they'd been waiting by the phone all morning, sitting somewhere by a window, staring out at that same gray sky. A voice came through the speaker, hoarse, tired, faintly cracked from lack of sleep — the very voice Lloyd knew too well, knew every intonation of, every barely noticeable trace of exhaustion or worry in it. — Hello?

Lloyd answered no more cheerfully, in the same worn-out, cracked voice, feeling a lump rise in his throat at the mere sound of his father's voice, familiar down to its last note. — Yeah, Dad?