I am whole, complete, untouched and unscathed. Where once I ran free and fluid, now I am a stoic image of crystalline resolution. I stand with my siblings twelve-fold in throney baskets, ever in cool contemplation.

Removed and submerged, quiet liquid runs across my clear skin like velvet. It is almost a sweet sensation, a reminder of who I was, running across my skin trying to break me, or become me.

I am cool to these liquid advances. I am cold to the touch and chill all that dare intrude upon my territory. For a moment perhaps I am larger, grander, and then I feel the lukewarm touch of this place empty me of grandeur. I am better than this place, but still I am modest in my bittersweet brilliance.

I have been minutes, submerged in this warming desert of a flood. I am giving little of myself, but every drop of weeping perspiration is something I was, and am no longer; lost to the masses and indiscriminate from their number. Still they wash over me, cutting like frostbite but burning like the warm touch of unshuttered white goods.

I am still whole, still me. In minutes the flood has barely eroded my skin, my heart is still cold and I am still untouchable. The flow takes what scraps I give it, but is unable to take more.

How long have I been left alone in this boiling ocean? My pristine skin becomes porous, my clear porcelain shell is a waxwork facsimile of its former self. I am releasing the air of my imperfections, rising to the surface to become cries; for help or for mercy, I do not know.

Why? Why would I be left here? The flood is cooled only briefly by my submersion, but I do not submit to the fluid capture. I am who I am, what I am. Who are entropy and equality to say that I must return to those I was? Where once I was many, now I am single, an entity with mind and matter. I have no desire to return to unbeing; please, do not make me return!

I come apart at the seams. Where my solid core should be is a gaping bullet wound an hour in the making. I have felt every drop of my lifeblood return to the flow, every crack work its way deeper into my being before tearing away another piece, a torn sibling dying even faster than I.

I am but a husk, now. A peppered fragment, a single mote of frost, soon to be lost altogether. Is this life? Is this my purpose, to die a slow and fragmentary death to chill the ocean that surrounds me? I do not remember life before my frozen birth, and soon I return to that liquid state. Perhaps this is it, my last thought before complete annihilation, my mind pinched only briefly from the eddies of the unconscious flow.

I am undone.