GOT: The Ice King

I was in a sea of nothingness—a void of inky, thick, and almost suffocating blackness that stretched for miles and miles with no end, seemingly infinite in scope.

It was cold, very cold. The kind you felt when you took a swim in a frozen lake in the middle of winter, naked. And there was no sound. The place was as silent as a cemetery with no trees and no wind.

I was scared shitless. The fact that I didn't have a body at that moment but could somehow still feel the cold only made it worse. I had no body, no physical form, nothing. I was just... there.

It didn't make any sense, and the more I tried to wrap my head around it, trying my best to understand it using science or even plain old logic, the more frustrated I became.

Adding that frustration to the anger, sadness, and morbid disappointment I felt because of what had happened a couple of hours ago, before I found myself in this place, only made me desperately want to claw my eyes out and scream until my throat became sore.

Unfortunately, even that was something I couldn't do since I had no throat to yell with and no fingers to tear my eyes out. So, all I could do was sigh—or at least something resembling it in my mind or consciousness—and lament once again how I got to this... hell.

It was just like any other Wednesday afternoon. I bathed, ate, drank some heavy coffee, and drove to the 'lab,' spending hours upon hours overseeing the production of amphetamines, coke, and other illicit substances the Family used to dominate the North American underworld drug scene.

To be honest, if I had my way, none of my 'chemists' and I would have been working during that time of the month.

After all, there was a war going on between my Family, the Cavallaro, and another, the Borelli.

A war that started because the young Don of my Family got greedy and decided to expand the operations, moving merchandise into the Borelli's turf, insulting them, and destroying blood-bound agreements that held the fragile peace between the crime families of New York.

It was dangerous, even fatal, to work in these troubled times, but the Don insisted, even throwing in a couple more guards to set my mind at ease. Sadly, his extra security was no match for what came next.

The soldiers of the Borelli family descended like lightning out of nowhere and decimated our soldiers to the last man.

Then, with no hesitation, they turned their guns on us and, despite our cries for mercy, started another round of slaughter.

Normally, in a war like this one, you don't kill 'chemists.' You take them, hold them prisoner, eliminate the loyalists, and then set the remaining ones to work for you, absorbing them into your labor force.

That was the logical textbook move. It increased productivity, profit, and reduced headaches from law enforcement. But I guess profit was the last thing on the minds of the Borelli's.

It was war, and they wanted to send a message—to teach the young Don a lesson the previous one, his father, didn't manage to teach him before he passed away.

So, for the sake of a lesson, forty people, including myself, died painful deaths. We probably wouldn't even get funerals.

They'd butcher our bodies at some nameless meat-processing facility into bits and pieces and then throw them out into the sea for the fishes to do the rest.

They'd do it all very efficiently, with absolutely no traces left of our existences. To our friends, families, and loved ones, we'd just be gone, disappearing like wisps of tiny smoke from a cigarette butt.

The thought of all this was so dark and scary that I wanted to chuckle and cry at the same time. I never thought I'd die young.

My future was so bright, my career so promising, that I even caught the attention of the late Don, who acknowledged my potential, saying he'd keep an eye on my career.

I pictured myself dying peacefully of old age in a mansion somewhere near the coast of one of the Hawaiian Islands, after living my life to the fullest and enjoying all the fruits of my hard labor.

It was a beautiful dream, but life had to put its foot down and remind me that dreams were just dreams and that reality was a bitch no man could ever control.

Maybe if I wasn't a criminal, I could've lived till my eighties or at the very least my sixties. But I was a criminal, and one of the best in my trade.

I was a fool to think I'd live that long. After all, how many people in my line of work did?

Sigh... I guess it just wasn't meant to be. This wasn't even what I wanted in life at the beginning.

As an orphan, all I wanted was to work hard and get enough money to live comfortably, and that would've happened if this world wasn't so cruel.

I had always been smart, ever since I was young. It was my only redeeming quality. I wasn't tall, strong, handsome, or even likable. I was weak, sickly, and dull—not a prime candidate for adoption.

All I had was my intelligence, and that was what consoled me as more and more of my friends got adopted, leaving me behind.

So, I used my God-given gift to my advantage.

I spent all my time learning, helping out the sisters with the orphanage, and doing anything I could to make myself useful, terrified of the thought of them abandoning me.

Eventually, after high school, my hard work paid off, and I bagged myself a fully sponsored scholarship to study Pharmacy at Yale.

The scholarship took care of everything, from my accommodation to even providing me with monthly allowances.

It was the best thing that had ever happened to me. As usual, I made the best use of it, learning tirelessly and working part-time jobs to survive.

It was all going well. I was in my final year, just on the cusp of graduating, when it happened.

I was heading back to my room one dawn, after studying all night, when some drunk frat boys leaning against their Lambo catcalling any women they saw, decided they didn't quite appreciate the way I was looking at them.

They claimed I was looking at them as if they were useless trash—which was true—but still, not justification enough for them to gang up on me and shove me around.

They were drunk, I was irritated, one thing led to another, and they found themselves with broken noses and injured balls.

I was this close to cutting one of them who burst my lips and almost broke my jaw with my knife when the school security team came in and apprehended us.

Obviously, the DC took control of the situation, and before I realized it, I had lost my scholarship and was being expelled from the school, with no hope of any other university or college accepting me ever again.

Why did all this happen? After all, it was just a small fight between a couple of dumb college kids, right? Well, apparently, it wasn't a fight.

Apparently, I came out of nowhere and assaulted three tall and fit innocent young men, injuring them because I was envious of their wealth.

Did the story make sense? Absolutely not. Did the DC buy the lie? Of course, they did. Why?

Because, from what I found out from one of my rich friends, one of the boys I so brutally assaulted, Carlson, was the son of the CEO of this top-notch law firm—the kind that made millions every year—and dear old daddy wasn't so happy about me beating up his drunk son.

The press would've had a field day if they caught wind of it especially since they were under investigation at that time, and they couldn't tolerate any form of negative publicity.

So, he found a way to twist the story, punish me, cover it up, and for good measure, thoroughly discredited me by making my professors conjure up accusations of plagiarism with 'proof' so that even if I told the truth, no one would believe me.

Unfortunately for him, the investigation of his law firm found him and his associates guilty on a lot of federal charges. He was sent to jail, his firm went bankrupt, and finally, Carlson committed suicide.

Justice was served. But at the end of the day, the damage had already been done.

Now powerless, with zero prospects in the scientific community, depressed, and quickly running out of my meager savings, I turned to drugs and made some morally questionable friends.

One of them, upon recognizing my genius, introduced me to someone in the Sicilian Mafia, and before long, I became an associate of the Cavallaro crime Family as one of their 'chemists.'

I couldn't become a full member because my deadbeat parents, who gave me up, didn't have any Italian or Sicilian ancestry, so an associate was all I could be.

Still, I was satisfied. I got money, protection, influence, and powerful friends—friends more powerful than that guy's father and his puny law firm.

They gave me a future—a dangerous one, but a good future nonetheless—and I was grateful. The family had earned my undying loyalty, and because of that, I worked as hard as I could and did all that I could for them.

...Look where that got me.

I was dead now. I died with no children, no one to mourn for me since those who cared enough wouldn't know I was dead, and no woman who loved me enough to wait for me day after day at home, praying I'd come home safely.

I had lived a sad, meaningless life, with the only thing I'd left behind being my fat bank account filled with millions of dollars—dollars I could no longer spend.

Good thing my account was set up to send forty percent of my funds to the orphanage every month.

At the very least, all of those millions would be put to good use and help sustain the orphanage I grew up in, allowing it to flourish with no headaches.

It was comforting to know that, at the end of the day, all my hard work wouldn't go to waste and, hopefully, the kids there would have a better future than I did.

At the thought of this, I cracked a smile—or at least I think I did—and came out of my thoughts to continue staring into the darkness I now called home, embracing the stinging cold and the terrifying loneliness.

If this was my personal hell or the afterlife, then it would be for the best if I made myself comfortable. I didn't think I was going anywhere anytime soon.

...On the bright side, at least I didn't have to worry about food and water anymore.

All of a sudden, a speck of beautiful, bright white light popped up in the far darkness. It was so tiny, so insignificant that I thought the darkness would overcome it.

But to my surprise, it gradually blossomed in intensity and grew in size, forming a circular white hole that blew out a wide beam of light that cut through the blackness to fall on me, bathing me in its radiance.

For the first time since I came here, I felt warm. It was a kind of warmth I'd never felt before. It was soothing and lulling, removing all my troubles and worries and replacing them with a sense of peace and tranquility that made me want to moan.

I felt myself being drawn toward it, my soul or mind actually moving toward it slowly. It was as if I was floating through air, weightless and unbound to anything.

I lost track of time as I slowly moved toward the end of the light, my thought process dulling with each passing second.

When I finally reached the end, there was a huge flash of light that filled whatever qualified as my eyes, enveloping me in a hotness that reminded me of the sun on a summer afternoon on a beach.

It was... comfortable.

"This must be what heaven feels like. I love it."

That was my last thought before everything immediately became blank.