The Last Breath Before the Ice Cracked

JACKSON sat in the dim hospital room, his breath rattling like the Antarctic wind that once threatened to devour him whole.

He was the last survivor.

The final heartbeat of Admiral Byrd’s legendary expedition.

Outside, the city moved on, oblivious to the truth he carried—a truth colder and sharper than the ice that nearly killed him.

He stared at the ceiling, its sterile white a mockery of the endless snowfields that haunted his dreams.

Every night, the same nightmare: the ground splitting, the sky roaring, secrets clawing their way out of the frozen earth.

Tonight, he would finally speak.

Tonight, the world would know what really happened in Antarctica.

The nurse entered, her face a mask of pity.

She asked if he needed anything.

He shook his head.

What he needed, no one could give: forgiveness, absolution, oblivion.

He closed his eyes and remembered the beginning.

The excitement.

The pride.

The feeling of being chosen by ADMIRAL BYRD himself, the man worshipped by nations, the living myth.

They called him the ultimate explorer.

But they didn’t know the darkness that followed him like a shadow.

The journey south was a parade of hope.

Men laughing, singing, dreaming of glory.

But as the ship sliced through the icy waters, JACKSON felt unease gnawing at his soul.

He watched BYRD at night, pacing the deck, eyes wild with something unspoken.

Secrets.

Orders whispered in the dark.

Maps marked with places that didn’t exist.

The crew trusted BYRD blindly.

But JACKSON saw the cracks.

The first sign was the silence.

The radio went dead.

The world vanished behind a wall of static.

Then came the storm.

Winds howled like banshees, tearing at the tents, ripping away sanity.

Men began to disappear.

One by one, swallowed by the white.

No footprints.

No screams.

JACKSON remembered the night BYRD summoned him to his tent.

The lantern flickered, casting monstrous shadows.

BYRD’s face was gaunt, eyes burning with fever.

He spoke of discoveries, things mankind was not meant to know.

He showed JACKSON a piece of metal, pulsing with an unnatural glow.

“It’s alive,” he whispered.

“Beneath the ice, something waits.

They dug.

They dug until their hands bled, until the ice was stained red.

What they found should have stayed buried.

A cavern, impossibly vast, filled with machines that hummed with alien energy.

Symbols etched into walls, older than history.

BYRD ordered them to keep digging.

He wanted proof.

He wanted power.

The men began to change.

Eyes glazed, voices hollow.

They spoke in tongues, drew symbols in the snow.

JACKSON felt madness creeping into his bones.

He begged BYRD to leave.

But BYRD was obsessed.

He claimed destiny had chosen him.

He claimed the world would worship him.

Then the ice cracked.

A roar split the night.

The cavern collapsed, swallowing men and secrets.

JACKSON ran, blinded by terror.

He heard BYRD screaming, a sound not quite human.

He saw shapes moving in the darkness—things with too many eyes, too many mouths.

He escaped.

He wandered the wasteland for days, half-mad, half-dead.

He found the wreckage of the radio, sent out a message: “Don’t come.

Don’t save us.

Don’t dig.

The rescue team arrived weeks later.

They found JACKSON alone, delirious, clutching the glowing metal.

They found no bodies.

No evidence.

Just endless ice.

The world refused to believe him.

They called him a liar, a madman.

They built statues to BYRD.

They turned his story into legend.

But legends are lies dressed as miracles.

JACKSON spent years in silence.

He watched documentaries, read books, saw his own face twisted into fiction.

He tried to forget.

But the truth gnawed at him, relentless, unyielding.

Now, as death approached, he felt the need to confess.

He called a journalist, a young woman named EMMA.

She entered the room, notebook in hand, eyes hungry for revelation.

He told her everything.

Every horror.

Every betrayal.

She listened, her face pale, hands trembling.

She asked about the metal.

He showed it to her, watched as it pulsed with a light that seemed to breathe.

She asked if he was afraid.

He laughed, a sound like breaking glass.

“Fear is ice,” he said.

“It freezes you from the inside.

But the truth is fire.

It burns.

EMMA left, promising to tell the world.

But JACKSON knew how stories ended.

He knew the world preferred myths to monsters.

That night, the hospital shook.

Lights flickered.

The metal glowed brighter, humming with a voice that was not human.

JACKSON felt the ice inside him crack.

He saw visions—cities drowned in snow, machines rising from the depths, mankind kneeling before forgotten gods.

He smiled, his last breath a whisper: “Forgive me.

The next morning, JACKSON was gone.

The metal was gone.

The room was cold, colder than death.

EMMA published his story.

The world scoffed, called it fantasy.

But in Antarctica, the ice began to melt in strange patterns.

Scientists found symbols, found machines, found madness.

The legend of ADMIRAL BYRD shattered.

Statues crumbled.

History rewrote itself in blood and fear.

But the truth remained, pulsing beneath the ice, waiting for the next crack.

JACKSON’s story became a warning.

A prophecy.

A curse.

And as the world slept, something in the darkness began to wake.

The last survivor had spoken.

The city of ice would never be silent again.

And the truth, once buried, would haunt humanity until the final breath.