At night, he was restless. When Leo would join him for merchant training, he would normally sleep near the fire with him. He had started taking Leo with him on journeys when he was all but eight, and Noah fifteen.

He was twenty-four now, and the younger man was seventeen. It had been over a decade since he had become indebted to the family. He recalled it with happiness and a bit of sorrow as he recalled the day he almost died, and then he finally slept.

It was a moment when Noah realized he was dreaming, but it was not just any dream. It was a dream of a memory long past. He was all but thirteen staring at the ice beneath his wagon. He had made a horrific mistake. Deciding to go across a frozen river to take a short cut.

The trees were covered in snow, and the wind softly blew. He felt his nose and face grow even more colder as he heard the ice begin to crack. The regret and anguish he felt was unimaginable. There was not enough time to jump. Before anything he took his pocket knife out and cut the rope that was attached to Sara from the wagon and hoped that his father’s prized possession would make it out of this. The only thing he had left.

Watching Sara run off as the ice cracked under her hooves made him grateful that even if he died, she would live. The horse his father worked so hard to buy when she was merely younger, would survive. Her golden blonde mane flew in the chilled wind as she galloped out into the distance.

Am I going to die?

Within three seconds of cutting the rope, the wagon fell through the ice and Noah into the ice cold water of the river he tried to cross. Then, it was black.

And when he opened his eyes again, he was met by a woman’s eyes.

“James, he’s awake!”

She called out to her right. And in the faint blur, Noah could make out a man’s face as he approached him, and then he began a coughing fit that didn’t seem to let out. Noah felt as his head ache, as his vision blurred more and more the longer he lay awake.

“The only reason you are alive is God’s divine intervention. You had an angel watching over your soul.”

The man spoke softly, he himself looked pale. Perhaps he was the one who had saved young Noah. His clamped skin and blue lips said all it needed to.

“Marie, we should visit the apothecary for medication. He will need some if we expect him to survive. The water was as cold as ice.”

It was hours later when the young Noah finally awoke in an unfamiliar environment - a small house at the edge of Kowa he had seen many times passing through the small city. As soon as he opened his eyes he saw a man, but it was not a man. He was not a man. A monster rather. Its hair was as dark as the mud left behind a storm, its skin as pale as the moonlight on a summer night, its eyes as yellow as the peel of a lemon, and its smile as wide as that of the horizon stretching across the ocean. It stood on its hind legs, its head nearly touching the ceiling - evident of its non-human nature.

It approached the young Noah, and then opened its mouth. Its teeth were as white as bright snow on a winter day, its mouth was so wide it covered its face from side to side. And then it released a horrifying high-pitched scream.

The scream was so loud it creaked with the young Noah’s ear drums and shattered the windows of the house. The scream was so loud that in the present, it pulled twenty-four-year-old Noah from his sleep.

He opened his eyes, and waking up back in the present, with the sleeping woman in the wagon, he looked up at the sun rising in the distance, listening to the soft calling of birds.