Polaris and the Goddess Glorian

In illimitable darkness a spark glowed and lived, and the soul of Polaris Janess awoke and once more knew it was a soul. The silence of oblivion was broken by a roaring as of a thousand mighty rivers torrenting on their courses far underground. One by one the man endured the tortures that those must endure who come back from the claim of the sea. Slowly and with exquisite agony came the consciousness that his body still lived -- an agony so keen that he fain would have wrenched himself free of the flesh and departed it. Fire, liquid and intolerable, raced through his every vein and artery. His head, no longer tenanted by a brain, it seemed, was a vast and empty cavern, through which wild winds moaned.

An age it was in seeming that the soul fought its way through travail, back to command of the faculties it had quitted, until it had regained the mastery of its two provinces, the brain and the body. The fiery rivers were quenched. The winds ceased their roaring. With a groan and a shudder the son of the snows once more took up the burden of living. Weak and dizzy and deathly sick, he opened his eyes.