Every step Lira took crunched against the frozen earth, a measured sound swallowed almost instantly by the mist that pooled between the skeletal trees. Her breath came out white, dissolving into the dark. The others' signals had long since fractured into static — Kael's voice last came through as a faint blur, Rin's laughter cut midway, Taro's calm hum lost in distortion.
Now, she was alone.
"Evac route, perimeter, observation," she muttered, repeating her assignment like a mantra. Her voice steadied her, even as her pulse refused to. "Find a path they can run through if this turns bad."
She pressed a beacon into the snow, its light blinking once — blue, then white — before vanishing into camouflage mode. That made five beacons set. The sixth flickered uncertainly, struggling to connect to her wrist device. The interference wasn't natural. Something was feeding on their signal, muffling it.
The woods around Ravenwood were unnaturally quiet — no rustle of wings, no creak of old timber, not even the wind's sigh. The silence was a living thing here, pressing in, watching her from every direction.
Lira adjusted her cloak tighter, fingertips brushing the hilt of her sword. The weapon's steel was cold even through the glove. She had long since learned that in silence like this, fear wasn't an emotion — it was instinct, the body's way of saying don't move, don't breathe, something's listening.
She moved anyway.
---
The outskirts of Ravenwood were nothing but fragments — houses split in half by frostbite and time, the woods reclaiming them in slow hunger. Roofs had caved in, walls painted with moss and ash. In one home, she found a dining table still set, plates covered in a thin film of ice. Toys lay on the floor beside a toppled chair. Everything was still.
Lira crouched, tracing the faint outlines of a small handprint frozen into the wall. Not smeared in panic — placed, deliberate.
She stepped deeper into the ruins, scanning the interior. Every mirror she passed had been shattered inward — shards embedded in the floor as though something had come through them. No drag marks. No trails. No blood.
Her mind filed it all quietly. "No signs of forced entry. Mirrors… broken from inside out," she recorded softly into her device. "Possible ritual involvement."
That thought alone sat heavy. Ritual meant humans. Humans meant this wasn't a simple infestation.
---
By the time she reached the town's edge, dusk had drowned the last of the pale light. The forest behind the houses seemed to hum — a low, vibrating sound that crawled up her spine. She adjusted the earpiece, trying to raise Kael again.
"Unit Leader, do you copy? This is Lira. The northern perimeter is secure, but… there's something off about—"
Static bled through her words, a faint, broken whisper tangled in it.
"...ira…"
She froze. The whisper wasn't Kael's voice. It was smaller, quieter. Familiar, somehow.
"…help…me…"
Lira straightened slowly, every muscle coiled. "Taro? Rin?" she tried again. No response.
The whisper came again, softer, as though brushing her ear from behind.
"…behind you…"
She turned sharply, sword drawn — nothing but fog and half-frozen trees stared back.
A shudder ran down her arms. Her blade reflected her face — pale, strained, eyes sharp with adrenaline. She forced herself to breathe slow. Fear was a weakness, but awareness wasn't. The forest could mimic voices; she'd read the reports. Wendigos used sound the way spiders used web — to pull you toward them.
She switched her wrist tablet to thermal scan — static-laced silhouettes bled briefly through the trees, then vanished.
"Great," she murmured under her breath. "They're close."
But the readings weren't moving. Stationary. Watching.
---
She found the chapel by accident.
It stood crooked among the frost-bitten ruins, its bell tower snapped in half and leaning into the trees. The doors were sealed by a thick crust of ice. Strange markings — sigils drawn in chalk and blood — ringed the entrance like a warning.
She brushed a gloved hand across one. It was the same sigil Kael described in their briefings: concentric circles with a spiral bleeding into jagged points — the mark of binding. But this one was done by a human hand. Too precise. Too clean.
Her pulse slowed into a thin thread of dread. "This wasn't carved by claws," she whispered. "It's written… like a prayer."
The air inside the chapel stank of melted wax and rot. She had to pry the door open with her sword, the hinges screaming as cold air burst outward.
Candles — hundreds of them — had melted together into grotesque towers. The wax pooled like flesh. Across the floor, dried blood formed shapes, spirals, and letters she couldn't decipher. Every window had been blacked out.
Her light caught the altar — bones arranged carefully in patterns. Small, delicate ones among them. Children.
A Wendigo skull sat at the center, its hollow sockets glowing faintly red as the candlelight danced over them.
For a moment, her breath faltered. The air itself felt thick — heavy with whispers that didn't belong to the living.
She knelt slowly, scanning the symbols. They weren't random. They were written in repetition: Feed them, and they will forgive.
"Forgive what?" she muttered. Her fingers brushed over the bones. Still warm.
Someone had been here recently.
The static in her earpiece surged again — louder this time, almost like breathing.
"Lira… Lira…"
It was closer now. Not a voice in her head — inside the room.
She rose, drawing her sword, eyes narrowing toward the altar. The whisper came from behind it, soft, broken.
"…saw the light… it answered…"
A shape stirred.
A man emerged from the shadow — no, what used to be one. A hunter's coat clung to his frame, the insignia faded. His head tilted at an impossible angle. Where his eyes should have been, black mist leaked out in thin streams. His skin shimmered faintly — not rot, but frostbite creeping like veins.
He stepped forward, dragging something metal that scraped across the stone floor — his own broken blade.
Lira didn't move. The man's voice came again, glitching through too many tones.
"We fed them… we joined them…"
Behind him, more figures shifted in the pews — still silhouettes until the light caught them. Civilian forms — a dozen or more. Skin pale, eyes gone. Their mouths twitched in silent mimicry of speech.
Lira backed away, hand tight on the hilt. Her training screamed to engage, but her mind calculated faster — too many. Her mission wasn't to fight, it was to survive and report.
She pulled an incendiary charge from her belt, thumbed the ignition, and threw it toward the altar.
The explosion was small but deafening inside the enclosed space. Fire caught the blood, crawling up the walls in ribbons of flame. The sigils hissed and burned. The Wendigo skull cracked with a sharp pop.
The former hunter screamed — a sound between human and beast — and stumbled into the flames, arms raised like a priest blessing his own death.
Lira turned and ran.
She burst out into the night, smoke trailing from her cloak. The chapel burned behind her, casting an orange glow against the snow. The fog illuminated in pulses, the firelight painting the treeline in feverish color.
She stopped only once — glancing back as the roof collapsed inward. The smell of burning wax and flesh mixed in the air.
Her communicator flickered back briefly.
"This is Ash Unit member Lira," she said between ragged breaths. "Evidence of human involvement confirmed. Ritual activity — possible cult. Multiple civilians compromised, repeat—"
Static swallowed her voice again.
She tried to reestablish connection. Nothing. The signal was gone.
The wind picked up suddenly, harsh and cold enough to sting her eyes. Snow swirled around her boots. When she lowered her hand from her earpiece, she saw it — a shape between the trees.
It was still. Watching.
For a heartbeat, she thought it was another Wendigo. But the longer she stared, the more she realized its outline was wrong — too still, too human. A figure in a cloak, unmoving. The firelight glinted faintly off something metallic — a mask.
She blinked — and it was gone.
Only the wind remained, whispering through the woods.
Lira exhaled slowly, blade lowering to her side. The cold pressed against her again — familiar, unwelcome, alive.
She set her jaw and turned toward the forest's heart.
"Kael… Rin… Taro," she murmured under her breath. "Whatever's waiting in there… it isn't just Wendigos."
The chapel crackled behind her, the flames bending as if drawn by unseen hands.
Above, the stars were gone — swallowed whole by the black.