Floating half a meter above the ground, therising heat cooked the soles of my feet. Yet the land filled itself with ablinding snow. Here and there a few charred bones and visibly frozen fleshstuck out from beneath the snow.

In the distance, between the hazes of heata woman appeared, clothed in a purple, smouldering dress, dragging red-hotchains behind her. Elegantly, but also cautiously she started walking towardsme, almost as if she’d never seen another human before and wanted to let meknow this was her domain.

Once she got close she started walkingcircles around me, with every step she took she pulled one of her frostbitten feetoff of the snow, strands of burning flesh started peeling off and sticking tothe snow like melting cheese to a grill. Every time her foot left the snow a stenchkicked me. I wanted to vomit, but there was nothing left in my stomach.

Then she stood in front of me and bent her,hardly describable face only centimeters off of mine. Most of her features, excepther eyes, seemed burned off, frozen over or both. Her eyes though, with a colddead look they stared into mine, the white in her eyes turned purple, exactlylike her dress, and the iris looked greyish.

"Thou hadst entered mine domain." The figure resembling a woman straightened to her full height, casting shadows over my form like a goliath in comparison to my shrunken body. Her guttural growl of a voice danced across my nerves, vibrating my teeth and making them clack quietly against each other. I squeezed my mouth shut tighter, hoping not to aggravate the being.

Her lips, or rather its lips, for it seemed hardly human, curled upwards in what appeared to be an imitation of a grin, revealing rows upon rows of tiny, sharpened teeth. Where was I? Who was this beast?

The only thing I could recall from my past was falling asleep on the evening of Christmas Eve after a worn out day at working at the department store. I racked my memories in the brief moment the 'woman' gave me, but I couldn't summon anything more from my muddled mind.

"Inferno. Purgatorio. Paradiso." It raised its' bony arms to the sky, the chains sizzling in her fists. The bright thing in the sky, I knew it could not be my sun. Whatever it was, it energised the being, a new glow emanating from the chains. It began to chant the same three words in a staccato rhythm. I suddenly felt the indescribable instinct that I should run.

I ran. My feet left the ground only to be dragged back down by the heat, each step a blistering slap against air that felt thick as tar. Behind me, the chanting grew louder, stretching the three words into something almost like a song. Inferno. Purgatorio. Paradiso. The snow hissed where her chains struck it. I didn’t dare look back, but I could still her: the deliberate drag of iron, and the wet tearing sound of her frozen feet pulling free with every stride. She wasn’t hurrying, and I knew she didn’t need to. This was her domain, and I was only a thing that had wandered into it, like a spider in a glass.

Then the chanting stopped.

Silence pressed against my ears like deep water, and in it I heard something new: a crack, like ice splitting on a winter pond. I glanced up despite myself. The bright thing in the sky, the false sun, had a line running through it. A hairline fracture, black against the white glare, spreading outward as I watched.

“No,” the creature said behind me, and for the first time its voice wavered. The growl cracked into something almost human, almost like a woman’s. “Not yet. It is not time.”

The fracture raced across the heavens. The sky split with a sound like the world’s largest bell being struck, and I fell to my knees, hands clamped over my ears. Shards of light rained down, drifting, slow and glittering, and where they touched the snow, it simply vanished. Beneath it, the ground was not ground at all. It was glass, and through the glass I could see a department store: my department store. The fluorescent lights, the tinsel garlands drooping from the ceiling, the cash register where I had stood for twelve hours straight. Everything was still and silent, lit by the grey of an early Christmas morning. And there, behind the counter, slumped over with my head on my folded arms, was me.

“That,” whispered a voice at my shoulder, “is what you are running from.”

I spun around. The woman stood closer than I had thought possible, her chains lying slack in the snow. The heat had gone out of them. Up close, her violet eyes weren’t cold anymore, only tired, and wet at the corners where the frost had cracked away from her lids.

“I did not bring you here,” she said. “You came on your own. They all do, in the end, when the sleep goes deep enough.”

“Am I dead?” The question scraped out of my throat.

She didn’t answer right away. She looked up at the broken sky, at the shards still drifting like ash, and for a moment the sharpened grin was gone completely. What remained was almost sorrowful.

“That,” she said, “depends on which of the three paths you choose.”

Far above us, the crack widened, and through it came a sound I hadn’t heard since I arrived. It was faint and tinny, but unmistakable: a store speaker playing a Christmas song, warped by distance, calling me back. I arrived in the staffroom again, staring down three doors that had not been there before.