When Jonathan lashed out from his niche, it was with everything he had. The way that the hungry animals were sniffing and gnawing, he knew it was only a matter of time before they tired of goblin bones and added him to the menu, so when he burst out from behind the thin branches that had been insulating him from the cold night air, he was screaming and waving his brand like a club. Made of dwarvish steel, he doubted very much that he could hurt it, but he was quite sure that with a little luck, he could crack a skull or two.

“Get out of here!” he roared, swinging the butt of his weapon wildly. “I could burn you alive, mongrels!”

His swings were slow and wide for the gray predators. There were four of them, and they snarled and nipped at the air, trying to slip in behind his swing while he frantically waved his weapon back and forth to brain them without success.

He quickly realized that this might have been a mistake, but it was too late for second guesses now. He considered trying to pull out his knife, but as short as it was, he didn’t see that it would be able to do much good. Instead, he lashed out with the only weapon he had: fire.

There wasn’t much powder left in his flask, and if he dumped all of it into a single wolf, it might be enough to cook some vital part of it, but that wouldn’t save him from the other three that were circling him. No, he needed something more dramatic. Pulling as little heat as he could, he lashed out at the group of predators with a wave of fire that dissolved into a small fireworks show. The sounds of growls and other noises of aggression were instantly replaced by whimpers of fear and the smell of singed fur as the animals froze in place uncomprehendingly.

That gave Jonathan just enough of an opening to charge in, swinging and scatter the animals now that they had lost the initiative. Even as they were running away, though, he was careful to pause and tend to some of the kindling that had caught fire, slowly tending the sad red embers into a flame. He had perhaps a shot left after that stunt, and there was no guarantee that they wouldn’t be back later tonight. His only option was to have the fire ready, just in case.

He spent the last few hours until sunrise huddled around the flame while he tried to figure out what he should do. It was a long and agonizing night filled with his own worries, even if no other predators tried to assault him. Where would he get something to eat without bait? How would he keep himself warm without firewood? How could he defend himself without powder? The last one wasn’t quite true. He had all the shot he would need with almost a hundred rounds, but without powder, it was just dead weight.

Wasn’t it?

Jonathan stared at the weapon for half a minute, trying to decide if his crazy idea had any chance of working before he picked it up and started to load it. He did everything as he did last time, ramming the ball and wadding down the barrel. The only difference was that he didn’t add any powder. Theoretically, that meant that there would be no explosion to force the ball out of the barrel, but then - he didn’t need to add fire the way everyone else did. He had other better ways. In theory, he should be able to pull the heat straight from the campfire and dump it into the weapon, right?

So, with shaking hands, he took aim at a pine cone that had fallen on a snow drift not so far from him, and taking careful aim, he pulled enough heat from his fire to momentarily dim it to coals, and then he dumped all that energy into the firing chamber at once. The result was every bit as dramatic as firing the brand the normal way, and the pine cone that he’d been aiming at exploded into hundreds of little pieces.

“Finally, something is going right,” he told himself, grateful that his losing streak was broken.

That at least made him smile. He had more than one shot; he just couldn’t leave his fire or really ever let it go out again. That would put an awful pressure on his need for firewood, though - doubling the amount he would need to burn every day when he was already running out.

Pain or no pain from his leg, that urged Jonathan to action, and as soon as the sun was high enough that he could see, he went out further than ever before from his small grove, searching for wood that he could use. Over the next few hours, he found deadwood in the lee of boulders and partially frozen along the river bank. He even found entire rotting trunks in a nearby copse, but those were much too heavy for him to ever hope to lift.

In the end, by the time he sat down by his fire exhausted, his emergency was postponed for a day, or maybe two, but all that work had only made him hungrier. In the failing light, he kept an eye out for anything he might be able to hunt, but that hope never materialized either. He wasn’t quite hungry enough to try eating tree bark yet, but by the time the world had been reduced, the flickering flames of his small fire and the howling wind, he was certainly thinking about it.

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He hoped that the weather would keep away the predators, but as he crawled from his bed to add more branches to his small fire, he knew that he wasn’t going to be so lucky. He couldn’t hear their growls or the thick crust of snow crunching underneath their paws, but he could feel the eyes of the wolves upon him as he did that. He could feel them out there, waiting for him to slip up.

They didn’t have to wait long. Sometime after midnight, when he had drifted off again, he heard the terrible growling he’d feared all night and noticed immediately that his fire was gone, replaced with a bed of embers. Those embers still held a great deal of heat but very little in the way of the light that the wolves feared.

Jonathan reacted without thinking, bringing his brand to bear on the closest wolf and drawing every last ounce of heat from his campfire to make a shot.

It was a desperate gambit. In the dark, the gray shadows flickered in the starlight, and he couldn’t truly tell where anything was. He couldn’t even try to feel for their fire while he was holding so much of his own. Instead, he had to point his weapon the best he could and trust in the gods to guide his shot true.

The brand’s report thundered loudly enough to scatter the animals and send them running for their lives. Jonathan thought that he heard one of them howl in pain, but there was no way to know for sure, and when the moon rose, he sighed in disappointment that there was nobody to be found. Sighed in despair and didn’t bother to reload his weapon after that. Instead, he just tucked himself away as deeply as he could in his pine needle bed with his knife at the ready and hoped that he’d scared them off for the night.

The next morning he eventually forced himself out of bed even though sleep was the only thing that kept the hunger at bay. Jonathan was forced to use the last of his powder to light the fire and realized that the next time he let it go out, it might just be fatal.

“Haden protect me,” he mumbled to himself as he fed the fragile flame twigs and slowly but surely forced it to grow.

While he did that, he thought about what, if anything, he could do about this. He supposed that he could always use himself as a source of fire. It wouldn’t hurt too much to pull a single spark of warmth from his body, but if one or two tries failed to catch the tinder… well - he wouldn’t have to worry about trying a third time because he’d be as cold as his firewood.

It was only after he was warm enough to leave the immediate area of the fire that he noticed the trail of blood in the snow beyond his small dirty campsite. The blood drops were frequent enough that trail was unmistakable, and he was certain that whatever was bleeding like that couldn’t have gotten far. Could I have hit something? he wondered. He’d been sure he missed, but unless the wolves had turned on each other, which seemed pretty unlikely, that was the only blow that had been struck.

Loading his weapon, even though he wouldn’t be able to fire it away from the fire, Jonathan set off immediately through the snow. He had to know, but even more than that, he had to eat. If he’d really killed a wolf with a shot fired from pure magic, then there would be no greater celebration than to roast bits of it over the fire until he forgot what hunger felt like.

He didn’t have to go far. In the end, he found the wolf in a pool of its own frozen blood only two hills away, which was less than a quarter mile from his camp. Jonathan whooped in delight. “I warned you I’d kill you,” he said, poking the corpse with the barrel of his brand to make sure that he was really dead.

The creature was frozen so completely that it was rigid, and Jonathan was able to drag it back to camp without issue, though the whole way back, he kept a wary eye out for the pack. He was constantly worried that any minute the other wolves would take issue with his claim on the corpse and run it down to take it back, and he would point his weapon around like it was capable of doing anything without a source of fire.

He left the half-frozen corpse across from him on the other side of the fire, so it could thaw and spent the next few minutes building it back up. Without dwarven powder, fire was the most important thing in the world to Jonathan now. Even more, than being able to keep him alive, though, it was going to help feed him in a few minutes. All he needed to do was skin and gut his kill, and then he would finally be able to eat something besides goblin. His mouth salivated at the thought.

When the fire was finally large enough that there was no danger it was going to go back out, he stood and walked over to the wolf carcass with his knife, but it was exactly at that moment that he heard a familiar sound: a train whistle, coming from the far side of the valley. Looking out at the horizon, Jonathan even thought he saw a faint puff of steam that quickly dissipated against the white backdrop.

Even though he had no idea how he was going to get from here to there, he smiled to himself. He didn’t have a plan yet, but he had a destination, and that would have to be enough. After all, all railroad tracks lead somewhere, and if he followed that set down the mountain, he was bound to find somewhere warmer than where he was now. All he had to do was gather some supplies, and he could be on his way.