1Euphoria

10/18/o6 wends.

"He's pretty strong... For an orphan..."

That was how it started. Manual labor – the odd jobs. The kind one would usually need animals, machinery or multiple men for. I could do them with barely breaking a sweat. I would lift heavier things when I was twelve – stacks of logs or mini mountain of brick I could handle. It's only when they started working me every hour of every day that I started to get a little tired.

It had been three months straight, of being the personal work horse for whatever farmer or merchant would pay me. Granted, I could have just took my earnings and refused another job. But I needed money, as ironic as that was. And the jobs would pay so little... I had no choice but to do as many as I could, just to save up for what I wanted. What I needed...

I remember the last day I had worked. I hadn't intended it to be my last, but apparently, the gods deemed it so. It was an extremely cold winter day. The skies were a bland, depressing grey that shrouded the land in the same color. The sun was out – it was mid-afternoon – but there was no warmth to shed. It was all bitter coldness.

I was out in the snow, trying to gather some firewood for a farmer who had hired me for the past week. There was news of a nasty snow storm that was to hit the town today, so he had me complete menial tasks that he could have easily done himself. Instead, he chose to lock himself up in his nice, warm log cabin as the weather grew worse. Even so, I did as I was told without a complaint, because that was my job.

I was in the middle of gathering the logs I had chopped up in the woods near my employer's cabin, when the snow storm hit.

I remember trudging through the snow, carrying a heavy armload of wood and hoping I could somehow manage to talk my current employer into staying in his house until this menacing semi-blizzard passed. Though I normally wouldn't have bothered him in asking, my thin clothing did me no justice as the cold seemed to drop below zero. Though I tried to dress in layers, being poor /does/ have an affect on what you can and cannot wear. The icy wind seemed to sweep up under my clothes and penetrate my skin, heading for my lungs.

Before I knew it, I was coughing heavily.

My coughing had gotten to the point where I began to hold my breath, just so that I didn't have to breathe. My throat was raw and my lungs burned with an icy chill that hurt with every gasp and wheeze. Even my eyes had teared up – but whether it was due to the fierce winds, the pain of just existing, or the force of the heaving coughs I had endured, I don't remember. I /do/ know that it made the pathway back to the cabin nearly indistinguishable. I know I veered off the worn path that I had walked along for the duration of that week. I didn't know where I was heading. I was walking blindly along.

Worse yet, my head started to hurt. I felt as though something was pushing from the inside out. Literally, I thought my head would explode. But at that point in time, all I could think about was getting back to my boss, finding a warm bed and falling asleep.

Though it seemed as though I didn't need those other two things in order to slip into a state of unconsciousness.

I remember dragging myself – literally dragging myself – forward, my head pounding and my lungs burning. The next thing I recall is laying face down in the snow, logs scattered under and around me. I knew I must have been there a while, because the snow started to form a sort of blanket on top of me. In that moment, I was numb, but could have sworn I felt warmer then... My mind at the time was frighteningly blank, and all I that filled my vision was the furious fall of snowflakes descending violently to earth.

The odd sensation of my over-worked body succumbing to the frozen euphoria of the fever induced warmth was all to welcoming, and soon enough, my eyes couldn't stay open for much longer. They began close gradually, fluttering at first – my subconscious unwilling for this eternal rest – when a black object obscured the pure ivory that was my world.

My eyes focused, and only for a second. That was all it took for me to take in a female above me, her face lined with what looked like worry, and yet still, she remained calm. The most striking thing about this woman were her eyes.

They were a bright lilac color.

The edges of my sight began to dim, darkness creeping up on me as my mind completely shut down, and I was no longer able to admire the angle of death's beauty.