"No way!" Felix shouted. He slammed both of his palms into his temples and roughly rubbed them, in an attempt to make the voice of the ranting Wendigo go away. It didn't work. The Wendigo still growled and hissed about how this couldn't be possible. Deep down, it also knew the same thing Felix had just figured out. This was real.

"How the hell did this happen?! Did you do this?"

"No. I can't do anything like this either."

"We've gotta fix this. I'd rather be dead than be stuck with you." The Wendigo grumbled in agreement. Felix looked around the area again, desperately and foolishly hoping for an easy way out of this. For this to just be a dream. Or an illusion. Just something other than reality. However, there was no such salvation. This was reality, and despite his apparent resistance to cold temperatures, the icy and restricting weight of this new situation froze him to his very core.

Several minutes passed. The Wendigo grumbled and raged before eventually falling silent and accepting the current situation. Felix stood silent and frozen, falling snow building up into sizable piles on his head and shoulders. Eventually, after both had been silent for a long time, Felix and the Wendigo came to a conclusion that disgusted both of them. For the Wendigo, it was like having to depend on a child for protection, and for Felix, it was like befriending the devil.

"I've had an idea. And I'm sure you have as well." Felix began, his voice trembling as he spoke. Whether it was with anger or fear, he did not know. The Wendigo grumbled in agreement. It seemed to be fond of such a method of communication.

"We're going to have to work together to figure out what's happened to us. Then, we'll have to figure out how to reverse it."

"So it would seem."

With that, Felix and the Wendigo had come to a very uneasy agreement. The first course of action was simple. Get out of the forest. Just as Felix began to walk, he remembered something.

He turned back to the burning cabin and stared at it. The blaze had mostly died down, and the smoke was starting to clear, albeit slowly and mostly thanks to the gentle breeze that had begun to blow. Myra's corpse was still up there. He couldn't leave it there, not after all she'd done for him. Not even before this night would he have left it. Now, he walked up the hill, slowly, dreading seeing her again. Hating himself for ever dreading to see her.

Nevertheless, he pushed his dread and self-hatred aside and continued his walk. With each step closer, the more he remembered her when she was alive. This was not the first time Felix would have seen a corpse, but he was in a better place when he saw the first one. Now, Felix was at the cabin. A large bank of burning rubble laid in front of him, Felix estimated that it weighed four hundred pounds at the very least. He extended his hand and grabbed one of the smaller chunks of wood. Felix swept his hand out in front of him and cleared away the rubble with utter ease. In fact, he'd barely felt any exertion at all. As much as he hated his new form, its strength truly was something to behold.

Behind the rubble was the thing he most, and least wanted to see. Myra's corpse had been charred by the flames, almost all the way to the bone. Tears forced their way out of Felix's eyes as he gathered those charred bones in his arms and carried them down the hill. He needed to bury them. Any old place wouldn't do, no, the grave had to matter. She was dead, and he had died… against that tree. Felix breathed heavily as he walked towards the tree where he'd accepted his fate, only for fate itself to reject him. His steps must have weighed ten tons each, and there was no monstrous strength to help him this time.

After what seemed like an eternity of walking, Felix came to the tree. His blood still marked the tree and the snow, the places he'd cleared were almost fully filled in already. Now, for a grave. Felix looked at his hand and sighed. With no shovel, this would have to do. He got down on his knees and began to dig with his right hand, his left still firmly holding her bones. He wouldn't let them go, not while he still had time with them. Twenty minutes later, Felix had dug a rough grave, two meters wide, deep, and long. He took a long look at her bones. Just two short hours ago, she'd been warm and lively. Now, she was cold, charred and very much dead.

Felix breathed out, and slowly began to lower the bones into the grave limb by limb, remembering one different moment with each one.

He arranged the bones with care, laying her straight with her hands folded. As he placed her hands, he remembered the first time she'd taken his hand. It had been a winter day, just like this one. Finally he placed her skull in the grave. He completed the previous memory, as the day she had taken his hand, he had kissed her for the first time. It was cold, and it was snowing, much like it was now.

Felix sat at the edge of the grave and had a thought. Could he bury himself with her? Just stop breathing and die? As soon as the thought passed through his head, the Wendigo spoke up.

"You won't die. As much as I hate to say it, you seem to have retained my powers. And that means you'll live under there forever. Eventually, your mind and spirit will break, and I will be able to take control of your body. So by all means, bury yourself."

"Wait, you can't control my body?" Felix may have been distracted, but even he wouldn't miss something that important. The Wendigo fell mostly silent, grumbling to itself. He took one final look at those beloved bones, and then began to push the dirt back in.

With the grave filled and dawn not that far away, Felix decided that it was time to leave the forest. As he walked through the woods, subconsciously guided by the Wendigo's impeccable sense of direction, he began to think of a cover story for what happened. Felix didn't have very many friends other than Myra, in fact, he only had one that he bothered to keep in with. He knew his father wouldn't care one way or another due to his wife and Felix's mother having died just a few years ago. When that happened, the Chilling family was no more, and was instead replaced with chilled booze. Myra had never known her birth parents, and her entire foster family had died alongside Felix's mother. No one really knew how it happened, but they did know that when a sports car and a minivan collide at forty-four meters per second, the occupants of said vehicles were likely to die. Now, this only left the friend.

Paul Baleman had known both Felix and Myra since their first year of high school. He was a nice guy and a star athlete on their school's basketball team. His background was similar to Myra's, and his personality was similar enough to Felix's, so they got along well. They were on good terms and met up at least twice a week. Sometimes, only two of them could meet up at a time, but thanks to the group knowing each other for eight years, there was a solid bond of trust between them.

This would mean that Felix would have to tell Paul about Myra's death, and possibly even about his current state. Neither of these things would be easy, but if Felix didn't tell him about them, He'd most certainly figure out some version of the night's events. Felix sighed and came to the tree line. Paul's apartment was roughly a dozen miles south, near the port.

Just as Felix was about to pass the tree line and start on his way to Paul's house, a sudden movement at the edge of his field of vision caught his eye. The movement had been fast. Whatever it was had moved entirely out of his line of sight within a fraction of a second. Another blur, another movement. This time, on the other side of his line of sight. He turned towards it, but stopped as another blur appeared and stopped right in front of him. Felix turned to face forwards, and froze in place at what he saw.

A young woman that seemed to be around his age and height stood in front of him, scowling at him. Her hair was cut close to her head on one side, and the other side of her hair had been styled so that it laid over the left side of her face. Her skin was slightly darker than his, and her clothing consisted of a hooded leather jacket, what he assumed to be a short sleeved shirt and a pair of jeans and boots. All in all, she was very intimidating, especially to someone like Felix. No normal human being could move that fast. Had he still been human, Felix knew he wouldn't have been able to follow or even see her movements.

"Hey. Name's Valentine. You're looking pretty rough, aren't ya?" Her scowl quickly morphed into a smile, and her tone was playful and cheery. Most certainly not what Felix had expected a few seconds ago.

"Huh-wha-?"

"Don't worry. I'm just like you." She smiled knowingly as she spoke. Her smile unnerved Felix. For some reason, smiles just seemed.. unnatural to him now.

"L-Like me?"

"Yeah. I've got a monster in my brain too."

Her smile was positively terrifying.