The man's skin is like ice under her gloved fingers, pale and bloodless. His pulse flutters weakly, as if his heart can barely summon the strength to beat. His breath mists faintly from blue-tinged lips.

Marian talks to the emergency dispatcher in short, clipped sentences, giving their location and vitals while checking the man over for any obvious injuries. There's no visible blood or wounds, but hypothermia itself can be lethal. She wrestles him into the recovery position to keep his airway clear, then removes her heavy winter coat to wrap around his motionless form.

By the time the ambulance arrives, wailing, she has managed to get him slightly responsive. His eyes slit open, pupils blown and hazy, but he makes a small sound of protest when the paramedics move to examine him. She finds herself riding along to the hospital, still wrapped in a borrowed blanket, unable to stop fretting over this stranger she rescued from the snow. There are too many questions about how he came to be there, unconscious and alone. She hopes, as the ambulance speeds through silent streets, that she was able to call them in time. His life hangs precariously in the balance, this man from nowhere found on an ordinary winter morning.

The patient's brief responsiveness is already fading. His lungs sound clear and he's breathing on his own, but slowly and shallowly, and they can't get a pulse ox reading at all; his hands are mottled blue and cold to the touch. They can't get a temperature reading either; the thermometer doesn't go low enough. He's not shivering, which is in this case a bad sign, his body too far shut down to even try to produce heat. 

His pulse is steady, at least, if slow and weak at a heart rate of around 35, but the blood pressure machine cycles for what feels like minutes before giving up. Marian ends up taking a manual blood pressure, and wincing when her best guess is 60/40. 

They reach the hospital still knowing nothing more than that; a quick search of the man's strange, vaguely medieval-looking clothing fails to turn up any wallet or ID. His ethnicity is hard to place, too; he could be Hispanic, or some variant of Native, but neither exactly matches. 

The ER staff descend upon the gurney as soon as it rolls through the doors. Someone takes over chest compressions while a doctor begins intubation, securing an airway and hooking the man up to warm oxygen. IV lines are placed in veins made prominent by cold, pushing warmed saline in a desperate bid to raise his core temperature.
Marian finds herself shoved to the sidelines, watching helplessly as they fight to save this life she found. The heart monitor chimes erratically, jumping between a slow, irregular beat and the ominous whine of a flatline. Each time the steady tone sounds, a jolt of fear lances through her - but each time, the medical team manages to coax the heart back to its sluggish rhythm.
After what seems an age, one of the doctors emerges and approaches Marian. His expression is grave. "We've managed to stabilize him for now and we're continuing resuscitation, but he's not out of the woods. Core temperature was 22°C on admission. Do you have any information about how long he might have been unconscious outside?"
She shakes her head helplessly. "I found him on my way to work. He was just - there, in the snow." Her voice catches. "Is he going to make it?"
The doctor sighs, removing his glasses to rub at his eyes. "Too soon to tell. The next few hours will be critical. Hypothermia this severe...even if we do manage to rewarm him, there may be permanent damage. For now we just have to keep fighting. Do you know anything that could help identify him?"

Marian shakes her head, helplessly. "I don't know. We couldn't find any ID on him." All she can think is that he must have taken drugs and passed out, but he doesn't look like an addict; he looks like a man who's lived a hard life, in some indefinable way she can't quite pin down, but who keeps fit and takes care of himself. 

She fidgets. "I'm, uh, supposed to be in the ICU today, I should - actually head over there. I'll find out if we can free up a bed to admit him, if he -" if he survives, but she's not going to tempt fate by saying it out loud. "As soon as we have space and he's stable enough to move." It's not ideal for a patient this sick to be in the hectic ER trauma bay for too long. Marian knows things can very easily fall through the cracks, there. 

She troops down the hallway to apologize for her lateness and take report on a patient, and waits anxiously for the phone from the ER to ring with further updates. (Or for a code blue announcement on the intercom, the least welcome form of update.) 

The call comes as she's checking IV pumps, nearly causing her to fumble the adjustment. "He's stabilized, for now," the doctor says without preamble. "We need to admit him to ICU as soon as possible. Any beds free yet?"
Marian glances around the unit, calculating. "We can make space. Send him up." She knows they will have to shuffle patients around, but this stranger needs intensive care and monitoring. His condition is still critical.
When the gurney arrives, surrounded by a bustle of staff, her heart clenches at the sight of him. His skin has a faint bluish tinge still, lips pale and oxygen mask firmly in place. The slow beep of the heart monitor is almost drowned out by the sounds of wheels and footsteps. As they settle him into the newly emptied bed, she checks readouts and settings, ensuring the warming blankets and equipment are functioning properly. His temperature has risen to only 25°C - still dangerously low.
The medical team disperses once he's transferred and stable, with strict orders for close monitoring. Marian finds herself alone with her patient, watching the slow rise and fall of his chest, willing his body to continue fighting its way back from the brink. She saved him from the snow, but fate has not yet finished with this stranger. His existence still hangs in delicate balance, dependent now upon the machines around his bed to keep his heart beating and blood flowing until he's able to do so on his own. If he's able to do so. The next 24 hours will tell.
She straightens his blankets with a murmured word of encouragement and moves on to her next task, but her thoughts keep returning to the closed curtain and the man behind it. A life in her hands, saved from winter's grasp. She hopes it will be enough.

Marian offers to take the patient herself, even though she's juggling the assignment with another patient, intubated and stable but in need of quite a lot of exhausting care. She was expecting this, though, and raced through the morning routine of meds and repositioning, so she can spend the next hour purely focused on admitting the still-unidentified hypothermic young man. 

She does her assessment. Aside from the small rise in his temperature, and a blood pressure now mostly staying above 80 systolic after multiple litres of warmed IV fluids and heroic doses of vasopressors, he mostly looks the same as before. The ventilator whooshes and hisses, pushing air into his lungs, but she has to take it on faith and the results of the last blood gas that he's getting enough oxygen, because with his peripheral circulation as shut down as it is right now, even the pediatric pulse ox wrapped around his earlobe is having trouble getting a reliable reading. There's something uncanny about touching a patient's skin and finding it not noticeably warmer than the surrounding room.

His pupils are still dilated, and react only faintly and very sluggishly to her penlight. He's on minimal sedation, but he doesn't react at all to any stimuli. 

Marian refreshes lab results anxiously, glancing up again every ten seconds at the monitor. They're not getting his temperature up fast enough, she thinks with frustration, and goes hunting for the attending to ask about more invasive internal rewarming measures. 

The attending agrees that more aggressive intervention is needed. Despite maximal surface rewarming efforts, the man's core temperature is rising far too slowly. At this rate, they risk permanent end organ damage or even cardiac arrest before his body regains the ability to thermoregulate.
Central line placement is ordered to begin warm saline lavage, pumping heated fluid directly into his veins. Marian assists in inserting the line, hands steady as she threads the catheter into place. Once connected, warmed saline flows in at a rapid rate, raising his temperature a degree at a time.
As the hours pass, the numbers on the monitors slowly climb. 26°C, then 27 - still worrisome, but improving. His blood pressure stabilizes without as much vasopressor support. By the time he reaches 30°C, Marian notices the faintest shivering tremors run through his limbs - his body attempting, at last, to generate its own heat.
When she checks on him during her break, his temperature reads 32°C. Still hypothermic, but no longer dangerously so. And as she bends over him to adjust an IV drip, his eyes suddenly open, glassy and unseeing. His gaze doesn't seem to focus on her, but the pupils react normally to light. Back in the common room, she breathes an audible sigh of relief. He made it out of the danger zone, through the critical first day, and his body is beginning to recover function. Life continues to fight for its hold. She saved him from winter's grasp.

Ma'ar drifts in haze.

He feels terrible. He's also very confused about where he is. His body feels far away, as though it mostly doesn't belong to him, and when he tries to open his eyes, it doesn't work, he can't see anything except blurred brightness. Using his Othersenses works even less well. 

His thoughts feel slow and gluey, and it takes him an awkwardly long time to reason through that he must be drugged. He can't remember how he came to be here at all. There...was a battle...? But he doesn't have any recollection of how the battle ended. 

His breathing feels strange as well, as though it's just happening to him, rather than under his control. And he can't move. Well, he also can't really feel his body, but when he tries to lift his hand, it's stuck somehow. (His hands are restrained with soft wrist cuffs tied to the side of the bed, to prevent him from pulling out any tubes.) Ma'ar is too bleary to really panic about this, but he doesn't like it. 

Gradually, awareness filters in. The blurred brightness resolves into a ceiling, strange machinery surrounding the bed he lies in. There are tubes in his throat, his nose, needles piercing into veins. He tries again to move, but his body remains unresponsive, strapped down and numb.
A face swims into view, a woman, her mouth moving though he can't make out the words. He blinks slowly, frowning, struggling to understand. She pauses, then carefully articulates each word: "You're in the hospital. Do you understand?"
The hospital. He knows that word, though its meaning takes time to penetrate the fog in his mind. A place of healing. How did he come to be here? Flickers of memory return in scattered fragments. The battle. A desperate flight. Cold, all-encompassing cold, and then...nothing.
He tries to speak, but only a rough croak emerges around the tube down his throat. The woman - a healer? - nods in understanding. "You're intubated to help you breathe. Do you remember what happened?"
He gives the smallest shake of his head in reply. She sighs. "You had severe hypothermia. I found you unconscious in the snow and called for help. You've been rewarming in the ICU. Do you have any next of kin we should contact?"
The words mean little. He stares up at her helplessly, lost in this strange place of white and silver, of noises and scents he doesn't comprehend. His memory is fragments and fear, and weariness tugs at the edges of his thoughts. She saved him, she said. Saved him from the winter that nearly claimed his life. But who is he? Where did he come from? The past is lost, buried beneath the snow that almost became his grave.