Terra spent a few precious moments lying in the snow and panting in an effort to regain her breath. Residual adrenaline meant that the cold hadn't yet struck her, and the fact that she'd escaped some horrifying creatures through a strange trapdoor in the ceiling of the library's basement, a trapdoor that led to a snowy landscape at sunset, hadn't yet dawned on her.

The part of her mind that was still functioning told her she was in shock.

The other part, the baser part, said it didn't fucking matter. She was away and safe, but where was...safety?

Sighing, Terra sat up and curiously looked down on the ground in the same place where the ornate door had been moments before. All she saw was a pristine snow drift. No magical door that led to monsters inhabiting a shitty library. Nothing. Nevertheless, with her shock abating slightly, Terra forced herself to dig through several inches of snow just to make sure the trapdoor wasn't hidden or anything, but beneath the snow she only found hard, cold earth that hadn't been disturbed in ages.

Fear growing, she picked up the odd key, which had landed in the snow next to her after she'd crawled to freedom, then inspected it. The shiny gold object was solid and firm in her hand, lending a sense of reality to the situation that Terra sorely needed. If the key was real, the door had been real, and if the door had been real, she wasn't going insane. 

Right?

Groaning, Terra lifted herself from the snow and finally inspected her surroundings. She was in a wooded area, coated in frigid, powdery snow. Ice clung to the trees, and the sun, which was only just setting, cast warm light through the ice, creating an oddly beautiful kaleidoscope of color. As far as she could tell, she wasn't anywhere near her campus. It had been a little snowy when she'd begun working on her dissertation in the library, but it certainly hadn't been snowing enough to create the huge mounds of white powdery snow currently surrounding her. Besides, it had been the middle of the night when the weird shit had gone down. Here, with the sun not having yet gone down, it couldn't be later than 5:00 pm.

Compounding her growing fear, Terra was even more unsettled to notice the silence, the oppressive quiet made more pronounced by the muffling effects of the snow. She couldn't hear cars or people or the general noises of the city where she should be. Terra couldn't hear or see anything but the thick, isolated woods. Hands shaking now from both her fear and the cold, she slid the key into her pocket then pulled out her cellphone. The time on the device still read 12:10 am, and the service icon showed that she had no bars of service.

Frowning against the panic that was settling in her chest, Terra concluded that she had to have hallucinated the creatures...or dreamed them or had a mental breakdown because of the stress of her school and dealing with her dick of an advisor. Or maybe she'd been drugged and was in some sort of chemical-induced stupor, the thought of which did nothing to alleviate her mounting terror.

No...it didn't matter. At least that's what Terra told herself. Whatever the cause was of what was happening, the snow beneath her feet was real, just like the solidness of the key in her pocket and the stinging sensation of her head injury. This was real, and she couldn't afford to let herself get caught up in the memories.

Terra took a breath and closed her eyes in an attempt to clear her mind, but all she saw was the long neck of the child-like creature craning towards her while the evil rabbit approached her from behind.

Stop.

She commanded herself to stop even though her mind kept trying to go back to these memories. Terra couldn't afford to think about the nightmare she'd just experienced. She had to focus on what she knew, and what she knew was that she needed medical attention. And, she needed it now.

She needed help.

Cellphones, even if they had no service, could still dial emergency services, so with shaking fingers, she typed '911.' In fact, the screen had trouble registering her typing because her hands were so cold, but she managed to dial out and hold the phone up to her ear.

But Terra's hopes were swiftly dashed when she realized that the call was futile. It wouldn't connect, but the odd thing was that the phone didn't even ring. Terra didn't get an error or 'call could not be completed as dialed' electronic voice message. She got...just...nothing. It refused to connect to anything.

This revelation caused a knot of desperate worry to settle in the core of her stomach as she tried several more times to call for help. Every time, she got the same result. Something was wrong, horribly wrong, and Terra was stuck in the middle of nowhere with no way to contact the outside world. Even though she tried to keep her wits about her, Terra couldn't keep from letting out a strangled sob and plopping down in the snow to take stock of her situation.