It had been a long time since Gerrit dreamed of his Durance - or at least a long time since last he remembered doing so. To say he had grown used to the constant pain would be a lie, but it hadn't been as bad as in the dream. It felt like the beatings went on and on, then came the cuts, then the burns, then the beatings started again.


Gerrit couldn't defend himself, he could only take it and wait for a brief respite. In that dream this respite never came. He just felt his skin become more calloused and scarred, his temper growing hotter and hotter until he suddenly had enough!
He screamed and somehow found the strength to leap at his Keeper, this featureless winged tormenter, this mockery of an angel, he let himself become the monster It wanted him to become and beat and tore and broke and-




He was out, escaping through the thorns and driven almost mad by what he had done and by what he had suffered. Only in this dream he also watched all of this unfold from the outside, like an out-of-body experience. The victim outside, the monster inside.


But he managed to get home, to stumble through one last especially thick patch of the Hedge and he was going to see his family again, they would forgive him and-




The Stonebones stumbled onto the clearing he dreamt of most of the time. The clearing of the Wicker Man and other mementos of Lost departed, the bitter-cold clearing in the center of a once raging wildfire. Flowers made of ice crystals were growing and glowing all around him. Was this the Wyrd reaching out to him? Did what he had read in the diary Rhodes had shown him work, was he able to steer away from the influence his Keeper had on him?
Pain and exhaustion finally won over and Gerrit collapsed into the thick sheet of snow, blood seeping onto the ground and freezing cold gnawing at his flesh.




When he awoke he felt different. The pain is his body was somewhat more distant, somehow numbed. Instead there was a fine prickling, almost like a burning sensation.
Gerrit made his way to the bathroom on legs that felt clumsy and slow and when he looked in the mirror he saw that he was only half-right: the Wyrd reached out to him, all right, but not in the way he had intended.
All over his body and face patches of skin have changed their color. Blackish-blue frostbite joined the purple-yellow-red rainbow of his bruises, and some scabs looked like they were frozen and crystalized.
Somehow the cold inside had found its way to the outside.