Around five days had passed since I'd holed myself up in my little hut, doing next to nothing except resting. I didn't dare push myself too much — not after what happened. Occasionally, I caught something small in the traps I had scattered around: a rabbit if I was lucky, sometimes just a scrawny squirrel. I boiled the meat most of the time; it was simple, and it worked. Every once in a while, I tried to roast it over an open flame for a change of pace, but it always ended the same — blackened, bitter, and barely edible. I told myself it was just practice. I needed to get better. Slow and steady, right?
When I wasn't tending to traps or cooking, I picked up a new hobby: carving. I started simple, shaping little wolves and rabbits out of whatever bits of wood I could scavenge. There was something comforting about the way the blade slid along the grain, long strips peeling off in smooth curls at first, then smaller and smaller chips as the figures took shape. I loved the sound of it — the soft scraping, the occasional crack of the wood yielding under the knife. It soothed me in a way nothing else could, filling the long, empty hours with a steady rhythm.
By the fifteenth day, I counted eight new arrows stacked neatly in the corner of the hut. It was funny — even with only one good arm, I was getting faster at making them. Each one felt a little straighter, a little sharper. Like me, maybe. Not whole, but learning how to work around the broken pieces.
On the sixteenth morning, I woke up to a rare sight: sunlight streaming weakly through the gaps in the walls. No snow. No howling wind. Just a quiet, brittle kind of cold that made the world feel fragile.
I decided it was time. Time to move. To breathe air that hadn't been trapped inside four wooden walls. I packed what I needed carefully: a little boiled pine for chewing, some strips of dried rabbit meat, my spear, my rough hand-drawn map, and of course, my wolf cloak.
As I made the final checks, something caught my eye through the grimy window. A figure — or at least, I thought I saw one — cloaked in green, standing still at the tree line. I blinked hard, but when I opened my eyes, they were gone. A trick of the light, maybe. Or maybe not.
Either way, it had me rattled. I grabbed my things and hurried outside, crunching through the snow to the spot where I thought I'd seen them. Nothing but wind stirring the trees.
Still... something in me stirred too. A kind of restlessness. So I decided to keep going, heading in the direction I had been facing when I first spotted the figure. It felt right, even if I couldn't explain why.
The sun was still out — a rare, golden disk floating in a too-big sky. As I walked, I found myself wondering again about this place. Where exactly is here? I thought. Nowhere? Somewhere beyond nowhere? My mind was slipping into strange places again. I shook it off and focused instead on marking the trees as I went, scraping a small symbol into the bark every so often so I wouldn't lose my way back.
After what felt like hours of slow, steady trudging, I stumbled across something that made me stop in my tracks.
A massive stone statue loomed ahead, half-buried in snow and vines. It was a creature — a gorilla, but not quite. Horns, shaped like a jagged crown, curled around its head. Two thick arms hung from its shoulders, but there were two more sprouting from its back. A single, central eye, carved into its chest, stared blindly ahead. The face was blank, eyeless, somehow even more unsettling for it.
The statue had seen better days. Cracks split the stone like veins, and in some places, whole chunks were missing. Tree roots wrapped around its legs and arms like they were trying to drag it back down into the earth.
I stared at it for a long time, feeling small. Feeling watched, even though I knew that was ridiculous.
I pulled my axe from my belt and hacked off a thick piece of bark from a nearby tree. Sitting down in the snow, I carved a rough sketch of the statue into the wood, trying to capture the strange crown, the four arms, the chest-eye. I'd copy it more carefully into Eloise's journal later, but for now, I just wanted to get it down before I forgot any details.
The day wore on as I picked through the area. Beneath a heavy layer of snow, I found what looked like a crumbling wall — stonework, the kind shaped by hands, not nature. Pieces of something older. Something lost.
I lingered too long. The light began to slip away, turning blue and gray as evening crept up behind me. With a sigh, I packed up and started the trek back to my hut.
That's when it happened.
I wasn't paying close enough attention. My foot hit something — maybe a patch of loose snow or a crumbling ledge — and suddenly the ground beneath me gave way. I tried to catch myself, digging in my heels, stabbing my spear into the ground for balance, but it was useless. The hillside buckled, and I was swept away with it.
Snow, ice, branches — they all blurred together as I tumbled. My body slammed into tree after tree, branches whipping at my face, ribs, legs. I felt something twist horribly in my left leg. Pain shot through me like fire. I cried out, but the noise was swallowed by the rush of sliding snow.
Finally, with a bone-jarring crash, I slammed into a thick old tree that didn't budge. I gasped, the impact knocking the breath out of my lungs. I barely had time to think, to realize I'd stopped moving — when I heard it.
A low, groaning creak.
I turned my head just in time to see the trees above me, the ones I had knocked loose, beginning to slide down the hill. One of them — a thick, heavy trunk — came barreling toward me.
I couldn't move. My leg — it wouldn't obey.
I could only watch as the tree smashed into my left leg with a sickening, snapping sound that seemed to echo inside my skull. A white-hot bolt of pain shot through my entire body, blinding me. Then the rest of the snow and debris slammed into me, burying everything in white.
And for a long moment, there was nothing but the deafening silence of the snow settling over me.