"The Frost Forest" From the far side of the threshold, a quiet snow begins to fall. Those who have shed the burden of the body no longer walk — they simply drift, dissolving into this silver silence. As far as the eye can see stretches the place where the end of one world crosses into the beginning of the next. The freezing air, still holding the memory of a warmth that once truly existed, wraps everything in a pale blue veil. The protagonist, now a shadow, passes between the swaying bare trees, gathering fragments of memories that should have been lost. They are the warmth of a fingertip that once grazed someone's skin — now nothing more than a faint tremor sealed inside a single snowflake. They stop. They gaze into the distant depths of the fog. Beneath the snow sleeps everything: the name of someone once loved, the shape of a house once called home. Yet now and then, in the spaces between gusts of wind, the echo of "that day" bursts open like a clear, crystalline bead. Lean in to listen to that hushed stillness, and the droplet of memory speaks… The sky is blue The mist is white I walk through the frost forest So that my shadow may never fade again The place where I remain is here, within this quiet ◈ Artist's Note A frost forest stretching endlessly beneath a blanket of snow. In this piece, I wanted to render a snow-world that carries a faintly uncanny warmth — as though it sits exactly on the boundary between night and the afterlife. What dominates the canvas is the gradation of cool blues and the texture of white, drifting mist. The trees spread their slender branches and stand as if breathing inside the silence. This landscape is not simply a winter scene — it is the literal field of vision of a protagonist who has lost their body and wanders on as a shadow. By deliberately leaving the outlines unfixed and layering in noise and subtle glitch-like textures, I aimed to express that blurred, in-between sensation where the living world and the realm beyond begin to bleed into each other. The silhouettes of trees emerging from the mist recede like fragments of memory, yet hold their presence with quiet certainty. What I wanted to capture was the beauty of the moment when something tangible begins to disappear — the world that becomes visible only once the vessel of the body has been released. As the protagonist moves through that still space, I have poured into this work the aching wish that their shadow may never vanish again. This forest holds something beyond mere landscape. It is the echo of "memories that once existed," dissolved into silence. When a viewer steps into this frost forest, I hope they find enough open space (ma — the Japanese concept of meaningful negative space) to layer onto it their own quiet solitude, their own sense of standing on a threshold between states of being. ◈ Edition This work is a limited-edition (1 of 1) giclée print from the Mystique In Enigma series. ◈ Keywords Frost / Forest / Snow / Shadow / Boundary / Silence / Mist / Ethereal / Digital Art / Fine Art / Mystique / Memory