Author's Note: I do not own The Phantom of the Opera, Gaston Leroux does. Anyways, I am sorry I haven't posted alot sooner. It is extremely difficult to do when you are working 40 hour weeks, have National Guard Drill, and have writer's block. So I know it is a short...-er chapter than usual but I am planning on writing more this weekend. If you guys have any ideas on what should happen next in the immediate future of the Phantom, feel free to give them to me.

July 1889

Those next few months after I had left the holy man were hard for me. Food was difficult to find and I was always very cold. One would think that a boy with such an abnormal intelligence would know that winter was setting in before he had made the decision to run away. As it grew colder, my limbs grew warmer. I developed a slight immunity to it.

Just because I had such an immunity did not guarantee that I was invincible to the snow that had begun to fall in late October. Humans felt sorry for me and yet they feared me. I saw them through the windows of their own fortune as they gawked at me. Their feet were propped up in front of a roaring fire as their eyes seemed to say, "Poor monster! Stop not here for the winter!"

As much as I had wanted to take them into my nightmare, I pressed on and out from the town. I didn't know where the roads I took at random headed, but I kept my body moving in order to stay warm. There was one point though, when the snow had gotten to up to my shins, that I could not keep my energy up. My body was slowing down as did my heart rate. My body temperature fell into a cold that I had never before experience. I grew colder, no longer being able to move as fast as I had to to keep warm.

Falling to my knees in the snow, I sought warmth and frantically curled up. Slowly, very slowly, I began to grow tired and feel ever so much warmer.

Due to the fact that I had read the medical books in my old home, I knew what was happening to me and how urgent it was to get up, but the warmth felt so good and inviting, I wanted to just remain there. How wonderful it would have been for the world if I had just let myself fall into the never ending slumber! I got up, obviously, and forced myself to continue on and not to fall asleep. I found the nearest shelter possible and made camp for the night.

I believe I slept in a barn that night. When the farmer arrived to attend to the cattle stored in that barn, I had to dig into the hay in order to hide. I would leave after I stole some milk and even a duck or chicken.

The entire winter seemed to go this way. I was not prepared for the for the snow and so nearly perished many times. I killed small animals in order to eat and felt a strange gleeful sensation as I gutted my knife into their stomachs. During this time, my mind finally envisioned my identity. I was like a plague to people, dark and forbidding, a monster hiding in the dark. Why I survived was probably due to the feeling that I was the Dark Lord, empowering my mood and furthering my dark urges. The boy in me who had tried so hard to give my mother a single kiss was now dying, being brutally murdered by a revenge vengeful angel of death.