Prologue

World ending in fire, world ending in ice, Mia had never really thought about these sorts of things. Wasn’t it more important to just focus on the brief time we were alive? Why worry so much about future suffering and despair if there wasn’t anything we could do about it?

But, now that she did have the chance to think about it, she decided that maybe the cutting really was worse than the burning. Maybe frozen hearts really were more hopeless than burning hearts.

Mia realized all this while she was in Hell itself.

If you asked the average person, they would probably say that Hell was supposed to be full of brimstone and fire, a place where the souls of erring humans are scorched and tormented for all eternity. Fire, fire, fire. Burning, burning, burning.

Yet for Mia, “Hell” was another place entirely. It was a dark expanse completely devoid of warmth, where even the thought of “fire” would probably be drenched in ice within moments. A cold place, a soulless place. A frozen Hell, made to house frozen hearts.

In Mia’s Hell, the night is never-ending and comes with a feeling of intense darkness that presses upon you on all sides, boxing you into a smaller and smaller space as you feel yourself spinning into the earth. Here, the sense of deep gloom catches your breath and makes you feel like you are inhaling the smoke from a wildfire. Here, the earth always feels like the pit of a deep winter storm, devoid of any sign of life. Here, the forms of deadly beasts are seen through the terror in your heart rather than through your open eyes.

But, in this Hell, the dark sky also has a swath of indigo with edges that resemble the crayon scribblings of a child, and that swath is dotted with stars and the crescent faces of four moons that erratically light up pieces of the earth. Here, though breathing in feels like suffocation, breathing out makes you feel like you’re running across the beach next to the saltiest sea. Here, there are whispers of songs that you cannot quite hear but that tickle your hair when you let your guard down.

And here, though the earth seems perpetually asleep, in the off chance you decide to walk barefoot, you would feel the thumping of plants that can never quite break through the chill, lifeforms eternally stuck between dark March and cruel April.

However, the most upside-down, inside-out, strangest part of this Hell lay with Mia herself.

Because for Mia, this Hell was not the site of her eternal damnation. Rather, it was merely the setting of a recurring dream, or more accurately, the antagonist of a series of heart-pounding nightmares.

But instead of feeling relief after waking up after each near-dream-death experience, all Mia ever felt was a deep pang of disappointment.

Because in my nightmares is the only place I can see her.

And the more I see her, the more I never want to let her go.