Cádo’s POV: Day 1

Bernard had been lying when he said it would get cold. It’d been cold before, when he said that, but once the sun was fully down, things became nightmarish.

I’d spent my fair share of time in the woods, hunting, tracking, camping and hiking. I knew my way around a fire, and I’d spent the last decade building as much strength and endurance as I could without pissing blood in training. But I’d never tried to settle myself into a forest without tools before.

Building any sort of campfire was a harder prospect unequipped. I was strong, but cutting fallen logs with my bare hands was beyond even me, and Bernard’s picked rocks weren’t faring very well even in my hands. In the end we got maybe two sizable chunks of wood, the rest of our fuel would essentially just be kindling. So we gathered as much of it as we could manage.

Fortunately, the terrain around us was far more thick woodland than farther up in the hill. Within ten minutes all three of us had an armful of twigs and sticks, and we didn’t stop searching there. Spreading out, scrying farther and wider all while Bernard picked a decent spot to make fire. He ended up settling on the base of a particularly big tree, probably figuring its yard-wide belly would make a serviceable windbreak. Probably, he was right.

I’d never been as involved in the writing process as either of my coworkers, to be clear. Bernard had quite literally written to live, and Kenny had spent all of his own rich boy free time practicing the craft. Between training and contests, I’d been much more distant and hands-off.

Still, I knew enough about my own setting to be sure that getting caught in its woodlands after dark was…Not ideal. I was hesitant to wander too far from the group, and as things got darker that hesitation only deepened. The moment we had a pile as big as any of our torsos, all three of us huddled up with our eyes on one another’s backs, barely even resisting the urge to try and stand all night for fear of an attack. We were already cold then, frozen almost to the bone through our thin shirts and kept functional only by the waste heat of worked muscles. We wouldn’t be going anywhere till morning.

The woods seemed to enjoy taunting us, rustling leaves overhead and snapping unseen twigs from every direction. That Bernard didn’t explode was one of the few mercies we enjoyed, but he sure got goddamn close.

“How did you get the fire started?” I asked, more to break the silence than because I actually had any investment in what the answer might be. Bernard must’ve been as desperate to hear our voices as I was, because he replied near-instantly.

“Flint.” He whispered. “I had a flick knife in my pocket already, and…Oh.”

“What?” Kenny pressed, leaning in, eying him. Bernard shook his head.

“Nothing, I just figured something out, anyway I made sure to snatch a flint while I was arming myself. Flint, plus steel. Might fuck up the edge of my knife if we do it too much, but we can generate sparks at least, and carve wood into shavings so they have something to ignite.”

I might’ve admired his foresight, had he not given both me and Kenny something more important to focus on. Bernard sighed before we even needed to ask.

“Fine, I just realized that whatever interface Kenny sees telling him things, it bases the name of objects on what either he or its wielder identifies them as.” He held up his knife, the blade grinning orange with firelight. “Both of you would call this a switchblade, yes?”

We both nodded, but from the corner of my eye I saw Kenny’s face stiffening with understanding.

“I call it a flick knife.” Bernard continued. “And so did Kenny’s…Ugh, menu, So, either he subconsciously thinks of it the way I would because of my owning it, or the menu assigns names based on the way an object’s owner perceives it.”

It really wasn’t that useful at all, thinking about it, but Bernard had realized as much when he figured it out himself. It was why he’d not wanted to share it, he always hated wasting breath.

Still, the revelation did something more important than illuminate us. It distracted us. For those few luxurious minutes, we all had something to focus on that wasn’t the horrible ice clotting every gust of wind to roll across our camp.

The world got colder, and we started piling more kindling onto the fire, desperately hoping that the pile lasted longer. Then the world got colder again, and we were closing in around one another, guy-code forgotten as we pressed our shoulders in and shivered, conserving what warmth we could manage.

It was after maybe an hour that the snow started falling, and that was when we truly knew we were fucked.

A lot’s happened to me since I first dropped into this world. People have kicked me, punched me, bitten, slashed and shot me. I’ve been set on fire, half-drowned, almost eaten by a bear and spent an afternoon picking bits of metal out of my ribs. None of it, not one scrap, has been half as bad as the cold was that night.

My fingers went first, all the sensation in them just halting dead in the tracks. My toes must have been a lot closer to the flame, because they lasted a good few minutes longer. Then the chill was running up my limbs, reaching the ankles and wrists, and I found myself crying. The tears froze against my cheeks, and still things got colder.

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I thought of home, trembling with the effort of not weeping outright. And things cooled ever more cruelly down into the sub-zero range. My thoughts of home became dreams of a damned blanket, or anything at all to put between myself and the sky.

At some point I know I fell asleep, because I woke up to a slightly warmer world. Slightly.

Everything was white, and viciously cold. I groaned, moved, felt everything in my body scream at me and fell still. I lay there for a couple of moments more before a hand came down on me.

“Cádo.” Kenny whispered. “You need to get up, dude come on, we’re moving.”

Part of me wanted to just lie there, and I might have. If Bernard hadn’t spoken first.

“You need circulation, it’s dangerous to lie there any longer.”

That brought my mind to the thought of blackened, shriveling toes. Amputations, hobbling footfalls and a lifetime of knowing I’d never compete with the best again. I got up.

Somehow standing made everything real again, and I shivered even before the cold bit through my clothes. My thin fucking clothes.

It’s hard to remember things after you’ve almost died, and I’d definitely been flirting with death the night before, but enough of my pondering had stuck. The emotions of it all, at least. Suddenly my mouth tasted sour.

“We’re never going to get home, are we?” I breathed, more to myself than anything. When I looked up, I met Kenny’s eyes and realized in an instant that he’d been having just the same thoughts.

He shook his head, though.

“We have no way of knowing, and about a thousand things that demand our focus before that. Now let’s go, Bernard’s certain the town is just a few more days at most.”

My vision was blurry, eyes almost held shut by the frozen fluid they’d been leaking during my sleep, but after a few moments of blinking and rubbing I could just about make out Bernard packing what was left of our stuff up.

Well, packing up is a poor choice of words. He was just stuffing the best of our remaining kindling into his arms. There wasn’t much unburned, maybe a quarter-hour’s worth of scavenging, but if that meant a quarter hour less time in the cold it was worth it as far as I was concerned. He paused before we continued, then picked a few sticks out from the pile.

“What are you doing?” Kenny asked, eying him. Bernard didn’t answer with words, instead moving towards the dying remnants of our campfire and holding the sticks over it. Their ends ignited soon enough, and he drew them back with care.

“Hold them upside-down every so often.” He advised, handing us both a torch. “The flames will rise and eat the full length of the wood that way, should last a while. We need to stay warm even on the move.”

We didn’t stay warm, not even close, but we stayed alive at the very least.

There was no conversation on our way down the hill that day. Whatever words any of us had for each other had dried up in the night. I was thinking about home again, and thinking about how I’d never see it again. My family, my friends. My damned home.

I had a rug, a real nice one I’d stumbled onto completely by surprise in some tiny little store near where I lived. I’d miss that, and for some bizarre reason that was the loss that stung deepest. Little things like that rug would be hard to come by, in our world.

You might have expected a walk like ours, trudging through ankle-deep snow and getting chewed on by the elements with every step, to feel sluggish, endless, slow. It didn’t. I barely even noticed the stretch it took to finish, because I was too busy dreading what would happen when it did.

Twelve hours passed, maybe. It was hard to tell. The air warmed a little, then cooled all the way back down to the vicious, frigid depths that had almost killed us the night before. By then we were more ready than we had been.

Bernard had been thinking during our march, and just a few minutes into it he’d picked some big log up off the ground, half-buried in snow. I’d been too preoccupied with my misery to see what he was doing with it, but I’d seen him fiddling away with a rock from the corner of my eye. When we stopped for camp, I got it.

At one end of the log, he’d carved bark and wood away to leave an opening, sort of a half-crater clinging to its ass. It wasn’t all that deep, or wide, but I could recognise the makeshift shovel in an instant, and Bernard was fast in handing it to me.

“Kenny and I will get the wood this time.” He told me. “You’re on plowing duty, we want a big patch of snow cleared beside a tree, then piled up on each side of it as high as you can manage.”

I frowned, thought about it, then everything clicked into place. Igloos. We didn’t have the time or gear for great big bricks of ice, but this would surely work well enough, right?

Well, if it didn’t, we’d never know. I didn’t think any of us had the reserves of life to keep kicking through another night of frozen hell. I got to digging.

There was a certain technique to shoveling snow that I won’t share here, because it’s about as mentally stimulating as being on the receiving end of a lobotomy. In any case, I was done fast enough. If anything, I was glad for the chance to actually use my arms.

But it brought my awareness to another issue, too. My body heated up, cold dissipating somewhat, and in doing so allowed room for another sensation to slip in. The fucking hunger.

How long since I’d eaten? Well over a day now, surely and I was certainly feeling it. Everything inside my body was slowing down, blunting, I was getting stupid, tired. One day without food wouldn’t kill someone, but it felt like it would. And I didn’t want to imagine another twelve-hour walk if I woke up like this.

Kenny and Bernard came back for the final time with great bundles of wood, and we set up inside our shelter. It wasn’t very good, not really. I’d hammered the interior to keep the snow hard and compact, hoping that it’d stop the fire from melting it, but other than that it really was just a white blob.

Still, a white blob was better than a white horizon as far as not killing us went.

We didn’t chat at all this time, all just laid back, rested, and agonized over our empty stomachs and homesick minds. The sky got darker, the air cooler, and the forest creepier. Sounds growing so common and spine-chilling that we hardly even noticed when the snapping of nearby twigs became a bit too regular.

“What was that?” Bernard whispered, a full minute before either of the sane people present became worried enough to echo him.

Kenny made the first suggestion.

“A wild boar?” He asked. “Or…Something?”

Even he didn’t sound convinced.

“One of us needs to check.” Bernard breathed. “Our little shelter is open to the elements, if whatever’s out there goes for us we’ll be cornered in here.”

All eyes turned to me, of course, but I’d already steeled myself for that. Fear always shocked me in how it stunted other people, it had only ever made me sharper.

I stood, stretched, readied myself and made for the exit on a stomach that suddenly felt much, much fuller.

Nerves of steel or no, even I was taken back by the great snarling bear waiting outside for us.