(Note to the reader: Most of this hastily written story is set somewhere in the mountains south of Frey’s village, several years before our main story takes place. Is it true? Or just a myth made up by an expert storyteller to teach the little ones a lesson... Well, you'd have to ask her that.)

Firelight flickers through the Great Hall, casting shadows that make the rafters twist and breathe. The gathered children huddle close. Outside, Midwinter night casts its deepest, darkest shadows over the village. Runa the storyteller rubs her inked hands in the warmth, eyes glowing like live coals with mischief as she casts them over her little gathering. Her voice is low and soft.

“Hear me well little Kuunlings, and I will tell you why you should not wander when the cold comes clawing at our doors.” A little shiver runs through her audience. The old woman’s antlers come alive with shadows as she tilts her head to look up into the dark above. 

“There are things older and hungrier than the Pale out there…” She lifts her hands to signal the beginning of a story. As one the children tap their ears to show they are listening, and the Volya launches into her tale…



Sigurd’s fingers are numb, but every scrape against the icy shelf still burns, small teeth of ice biting at his skin. He clings to them anyway. Below him, the black void yawns, endless and empty, but somehow alive with sound… wind, he tells himself. Wind.

Unless it isn’t.

He slips as fresh shivers slam through his body, his heart like a hammer. His legs ache and tremble. Breath bursts in ragged clouds, but the cold steals them before he can taste warmth.

The sun hasn’t come out for days, or what feels like days. Silence presses in, heavy and somehow wrong… and then it howls. Not the wind. Something else, far below, deliberate, patient.

It has found him again. How?

Fear hammers through him, makes him faster, but clumsier, desperate. And then snow crunches under his hand. He’s at the cliff’s edge. He pulls himself up and over and collapses there, chest heaving, staring into the blackness above. There is no sky. Only endless dark, infinite in all directions.

I fell into Hel. Sigurd thinks. I fell into Hel and now its hound is after me.

He shakes his horns to cast away that madness. It’s just winter, he tells himself. It has always been this dark in midwinter. 

Fumbling in his pocket, he finds flint and steel. Relief flares, tiny, pathetic, and it vanishes like mist beneath another long, mournful howl. Impossible to tell the distance, the source. The cold presses in harder, seeping into his bones, his marrow. I have to find shelter, I have to make a fire.

He crawls, the snow dragging at his boots, each push sluggish, uncertain. A tree scrapes his coat, its rough bark a tiny tether to the world. Pine needles sting his face, biting, pinning him to the present.

He prays. Not because he believes… the gods are long dead, but in case anything, anyone, some flicker of attention, might answer him. Moonlight. Stars. A glimmer of something real in the endless dark. Please.

The silence presses closer. The night waits. An owl screeches nearby and Sigurd’s heart nearly seizes before he gets a grip on his fear. A huff of bitter laughter steams out of his breath. “When did I become a craven old man?” He asks out loud. 

The words die in the dark, swallowed by the forest, reminding him how utterly alone he is. Reminding him of the companions he lost, one by one, to that… thing.

I won’t call it a wolf anymore. He thinks. No living wolf hunts like this, long after its hunger must be sated.

Fumbling in his pocket, fingers stiff and clumsy, he drags out flint and steel again. His hands tremble, nearly dropping the tinder, but a spark catches. A flicker, a fragile flame. It trembles in his grip, weak and pitiful against the oppressive black. The trees loom around him, dense and unyielding, shadows curling like smoke that refuses to disperse.

With no other choice, he presses forward. The forest seems to breathe around him, limbs scraping, leaves whispering in unsettling tones. Memories flash through his mind…three days, if they can be called that, three days of three men trudging through the woods, hoping to find meat to feed the village.

It started on the second night, while they slept near the smoldering remains of their campfire. Silence, peace.. And then snarling, screaming chaos in the dark. The fire had gone out, no one saw anything and for several frantic heartbeats they fumbled to get it relit. 

When Sigurd’s companion Tyr had finally made light bloom into the shadows, there were only two of them. 

The third night had been worse. They had spent what passed for daytime on the trail of deer, bickering like old women about the fate of their lost companion. It was a wolf, Tyr proclaimed confidently. Show me its tracks then, Sigurd had rebutted. There were none. 

It was a trick of our minds, Lief played a trick, he’ll be back any minute laughing at us. Sigurd’s only answer to this was silence. Hours had passed with no sign or sound of a return, laughing or otherwise. 

It set his horns itching to ponder it too long, and his people had lived on the border of death long enough to be pragmatic, if not cold about it. Lief was gone. That’s all there was to it.  

They spent the third night huddled close to a fire that was bigger than it strictly needed to be, with more wood than strictly necessary, neither one capable of sleep. Or so they thought. 

A full day of following a cold trail took its toll, and slumber had crept in as Sigurd sat hunched near the crackling warmth. Soon his horns grew heavy and his head began to loll. The eyes are what snapped him awake. 

Great yellow eyes in the darkness, hovering above Tyr’s head as his friend stared heedless into the flames. Far, far too high, no wolf was that tall, no bear had eyes like that. Sigurd was struck dumb, all he could do was point and make a weak, startled grunt. 

Tyr never even lifted his head. The eyes flashed, firelight glinted off enormous pale fangs, fur blacker than the night around it bristled and his friend was gone. Dragged into the dark, muffled screams cut off way too short. 

Sigurd had done something he had never done before in his life. He ran. With just enough presence of mind to grab a burning stave out of the fire, he took off into the night. 

Tears flow down his cheek and freeze there recalling that desperate flight into the dark, his friend’s choked scream. The trees around him press in even thicker and his little flame threatens to go out. I’m sorry. He prays to no one. I’m sorry, I’m sorry… over and over. 

A breath of wind catches his attention, the scent of it breaking him out of his spiral of self pity. Damp, granite, moss. A cave. 

The thought is equal parts comfort and terror and he is frozen with indecision. It could be shelter... It could also be a lair. 

It never had a scent. The revelation strikes him to the bones. In his panic he never even thought about it. I never once smelled it.

With a heave of his tired, groaning muscles he pushes through the last branches. It’s there, black against the wavering little light in his hand. Yawning into the mountain side, tall enough for two men and wide enough for three, the maw of a cave. 

A huff of breath from his lungs adds to the growing frost on his beard. Shelter. Warmth. Safety. In his heart a little flame of hope rekindles. 

From deep within the shadows of that maw, a low, hungry snarl. His heart drops like a stone. The little flame in his hand snuffs out. Darkness. Cold. Death. 

All he ever sees are the eyes…those great yellow eyes in the dark...