I do not sleep. Not in the conventional meaning of the word. Still, I do appreciate these quiet hours of inactivity when I can give my mind some pause and relax my eyes and body. I've even come to imagine that this recurring ritual does me some good, in some strange way. I don't know. I take very little for granted, these days.

I do not need to breathe, either, but somehow, the act of inhaling and exhaling - slowly, deeply - comforts me. Helps me concentrate. Helps me let go. I follow the stream of air into myself, deeper with every breath, and allow my attention of the outside world to slowly slip away and slacken with every cool exhalation.

It always begins in my chest, with that regular, dependable rise and fall. The pleasant tingle that seeps in where tension and alertness drains out. It fills me until it spills over into my abdomen and my arms, and at this point I begin to twitch just a little. But by the time the comfortable sensation reaches my legs I am still again, and even my breathing will slowly subside to nothing. Nothing but sweet, tingling stillness and peace.

It takes yet a while before the calmness completely reaches my head, but when that happens... It will appear before me. Always, always the same � always, always as perfectly clear. As though these last 500 years never were at all. As though it was only a moment ago that I was there - no, as if I was still there now, fully awake, with open eyes.

The twilight world spreads out before me in all its majestic, crystalline splendour. Endless, sweeping expanses that stretch out like ballroom floors of thick, polished glass, unevenly broken off by the jagged, even-sided spines of multicoloured ice that cluster together in blocks and ridges, rivalling the size and fearsomeness of any earthly mountain.

Here and there, the spines are hollowed out, and each crystal rod will work like a pipe in a gigantic organ as the fierce wind - colder than anything any human could possibly imagine - howls across the empty wasteland.

If I close my eyes and block out the shifting, reverberating tones of the ice-pipes and the lonesome howl of the ceaseless wind, I can hear the song of the ice itself. Under my feet it mumbles and groans with deep bass voices. Sometimes far away, sometimes closer, but never, ever silent. If I strain my ears even further, I can hear in the structure, the very tenor of those slow, moaning voices, the promise of wide, interlinked caverns in an infinite network, far, far beneath the black, shimmering ice.

Down there, things crawl and creep and stalk and hunt in a world of eternal, impenetrable darkness. Far away from the sonorous wind and the piping ice, but surrounded on all sides by those low, haunting voices of the deep.

Up here, the aurora is the only thing that provides us with light to see by, except for that one, bright star that traverses the sky at regular intervals and brings about a state that could generously be described as day. If not the flickering, multicoloured sheets of aurora had provided far more luminescence.

Things hunt and stalk and kill and die in this twilight world as well, and I am one of them. I hunt and kill, and try to avoid those who would hunt and kill me, as they do those who would hunt and kill them. This is a cold world. A world of ice and song and music and beauty, but also a world of deceit, danger and terrible, sudden, painful death. Hunter becomes hunted in the blink of an eye. The strong will kill the weak and the weak will band together to kill the strong - only to turn on their former comrades the very instant one would falter in his vigilance.

In this place, if you do not kill, you die. This is the place I spawned from. The place where I lived out the first fifty years of my long life. My lost paradise. My nightmarish hell. My home.

This is Rimhalla, seventh world from the dead star that marks the centre of Nifelheim, one of the inner circles of this place of chaos that the creatures who know of such things call Demonicum.