Frostbitten

He stared down at the keys in his hand,
they were old-fashioned and heavy, they'd rusted in place on the
ring, each key was fused in place, locked in the position they'd
fallen in and lain in the damp for decades.

Except one.

A single key was loose, and the rust
was worn away, it looked almost polished. And on the scalloped
decorative end of the key, was a very vivid fingerprint. The old
legend of Bluebeard's wife, with her bloodstained key that no amount
of scrubbing could polish away, came to the fore of his already too
active imagination. Good thing this fingerprint didn't look in anyway
bloody, but that didn't stop him from slipping his hand inside his
coat and pulling out his rosary, running this thumb along the beads
as he utter a quick prayer to the Blessed Mother that there was
nothing else similar between that story and the strange keys he held
in his gloved hand.

Kurt deliberately ignored how cold it
was getting.

It seemed that he shouldn't feel it,
and there was a low buzz of confusion and unintelligible mutterings
behind his own thoughts.

He tried to push that other, alien,
stream of consciousness away, he needed to concentrate, he could deal
with his new exciting mental illness later.

Ok, he had a key, now he needed a lock.

Kurt pivoted on his heel in a slow
circle, as if the keys were a dousing rod and would somehow magically
led him to the right door.

Everything is a door

Blink.

Gott, he was
going crazy.

Well, he could
start with the Scene of the Crime; the morgue. At least he knew where
that was, so he could teleport there and get away from the cold that
seemed to be leeching every bit of warmth from his bones.

Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Kurt
hit the ground hard, his wind knocked from his chest, as pain wracked
his body, curling into the fetal position as he tried to gasp air
back into his lungs, his nose gushing blood.

Something wenthorribly wrong.

Finally, he could breathe and rolled
onto his back to wait out the fading pain and his nosebleed -- which
was slowing, thank Gott -- to stop.

This? Was not
the morgue.

Wherever he was, it was dark and cold. He
could see his breath wisp up toward the tree above him.

Something
dark swayed from a branch above, spinning in the bone-chilling wind
that pushed the clouds away from the two moons that hung low in the
night sky, their silvery light illuminating the withered face of the
poor creature that swung from its broken neck. Its face was only
partially pecked clean of flesh by whatever carrion eating birds
lives in this place. Kurt's eyes fixed on one particular feature that
clenched at his gut, the doomed soul had one perfect pointed ear.

Not the morgue,
eh? That odd 'otherness' began to chuckle softly in the back of
his aching head.

Kurt crawled away as far as his aching
muscles would let him, horror shaking him more than the cold.

His
bleeding nose and the cold had shielded him from the stink, but now
he could start to smell it, the death. And looking back over his
shoulder, that one body wasn't the only one that was hung from that
tree. All slender and similar in height -- except for what were
obviously children.

He dug his fingers into the nearly frozen
ground as he wretched, and knelt hunched there, calming himself as he
spit and wiped at his mouth.

He had to find shelter, the wind
was getting colder and he wanted to put as much distance between
himself and that tree as possible. There was no way he could
teleport, not until he recovered... and that could take days.

So
he made himself walk.

And forced himself
to not reached into his coat pocket and throw the keys as far as he
could. They felt suddenly heavy...and tainted. Like bad memories
clung to the keys along with the rust. But, he stopped himself,
aversion aside, he might need them to get back.

This wasn't the
first time he'd found himself in a different world, but somehow this
place seemed much more malevolent than any of the other 'Earths' he'd
visited during his adventures with Excalibur. And, and of course,
the extra moon rather suggested that any 'Earth' information would be
a bit irrelevant here.

Wherever 'here'was.

Keep moving. He had
to keep his blood moving and warm, his coat might as well been made
of tissue paper for all the protection it provided against the biting
cold.

There was a
road, unpaved but looked well traveled, and he kept to the tree-line,
counting on his ability to blend with the shadows as he kept
moving.

An hour passed and he saw a glow in the distance,
deeper into the woods. A camp-fire. He slipped toward it, if the
camper was asleep, he could do a little good old fashioned thieving,
at the very least, he could steal a little bit of fire to make his
own camp with, wait out the night and face this new disaster in the
morning.

There was no sleeping for him this night, not with
the images of that killing tree still fresh in his mind.

He
crept as close as he dared to the camp -- and silently cursed -- a
cloaked and hooded figure sat upright against a pack, running a
whetstone along the blade of a wicked looking sword, strands of white
or blond hair escaped the hood when the wind blew.

And -- of
course -- there was a horse. Kurt froze, but the animal was already
agitated, dashing Kurt's hopes of trying his hand at being a
horse thief.

There was something about the figure that sat so
casually sharpening his sword.

He knows I'm standing
here...

Kurt wondered if he had the strength to even
outrun him...