The distant "music" Jonas had heard was getting louder and louder, as the sled went faster and faster, making the whirring and swirling snow nothing but a blur around him.

Jonas was not experiencing a memory this time. He was experiencing experience itself. Jonas felt a hoarse, tired chuckle escape from his parched throat.

He smiled, and held Gabe closer to himself. He looked down at his little brother, and surprised himself by releasing an inhuman scream that echoed through the empty world around him.

The baby's face was blue and still. His hair was dirty straw plastered and pressed onto his wax-like skin. His eyes were closed and they looked like they would never open again.

Something was very, very wrong.

Jonas looked up. The sled was still speeding faster and faster as the "music" had gotten so loud, in fact, that it hardly became indistinct anymore. He suddenly realized that the sled had been moving for more than five minutes. Even by only knowing these "hills" from his memories, he knew that it was not supposed to take this long to go down it.

Something really was... very, very wrong.

His eyes lifted ahead and he realized that he couldn't see an ending to the hill. It was all a swirling white vortex of blindness.

The "music" was so loud now that Jonas wished he could release his hands form around Gabe's freezing body and press them against his ears.

This, he knew, was not musing. It was merely the howling of the wind against his frost-bitten ears.

A tear formed within his almost sightless eyes and froze barely before it had a chance to trickle.

This is no sled ride at all.

Jonas blinked.

The sled was gone.

The music had returned to the ghostly howl of the wind. It churned around him and his dying Gabe, biting at their very faces of pasty wax.

Jonas wished now that he could cry. His neck could barely move as he took one last look at his beloved brother, the whole purpose of his present being. Why, oh why, in the midst of this spinning tempest of snow, did Gabriel look so peaceful?

Instead of sitting on a sled, Jonas was sitting on a dead log in the middle of December's heart of ice. Memories of his first steps, all the way to the Giver's smile had flooded his mind. They weren't like the memories he was used to. These were his memories; his own life rushing quickly before his snow-crested eyes.

With the last bit of strength he had, he kissed Gabe with lips turned to stone by the winter air.

"G'night, Gabe," he said in that hoarse voice he couldn't recognize.

Jonas felt suddenly warm, and he was dead.

The last thing he heard before the world flooded into dreams were footsteps and a distant voice of an unrecognizable man,

"It's too late for the elder one... but the baby's still alive."