Cryophobia

Creatures, monsters, lurked deep in the stormy night.

With their crystal claws they stung and they sliced, and with their diamond teeth they nipped and they bit. All sight unseen, for a human eye could not comprehend it. Whether it was cloth or armor, whatever he had did nothing to stop them. The sound of crunching and packing of their heaped corpses followed him ceaselessly with every step.

In the night, empty howls echoed in a cloudy moonless sky. Their endless assault whipped like barbed flails and their forms were as evanescent as spirits.

There, a grizzled man sat in his decrepit, almost imaginary box; in it he desperately held on to the final embers of mortal flame. He turned his weary, dry eyes to the blinding whiteness beyond its confines. The monsters. Their howls followed, but he could already feel them. Their bodies approached, but he could not see them.

The gaze was bleak; devoid of emotion, devoid of resistance and determination, but they cringed in its painful, confounding light. His eyelids struggled; it pained to blink, and it ached to stay awake. He could take in no more but disgust and a warped sense of terror for all that he had suffered.

His body was bruised and bitten; his skin, his fingers and toes flayed in hues of black and blue and purple, cracking in pain and eventually falling off as they fell numb.

Then, the whiteness beyond the prison faded to black. His monsters followed him inside.