I-

Vin-

Kit-

Gast-

Wil-

Tully-

⬛⬛⬛⬛-

Seoras-

Maja-

Babs-

Drue-

Who? Where?

I was…

***

-dreaming, ⬛n the same vein I alw⬛ys d⬛.

My legs were heavy, as if plunged into the putrid mouth of a sucking bog. Weaving in and out of the shadows around me was Mother, barking instructions in some deeply true language I could scarcely understand. The steps she commanded rung with savage beauty, but though I swung my body my feet always slopped a beat too late. Every movement drew me deeper into the ravenous earth. I swung my sword, except with the mud reaching just below my breast it had become a lute. Mother looked down at it with a sneer then placed her boot upon my shoulder and began to slowly press down…

And I wrestled against the fur blankets burying me as someone shook my shoulders and reached for the sword laying beside my bed.

“Kit!” Davian hissed.

“Wha- Davian?” I rubbed my eyes. “Blood’re you doin’ wakin’ me up so early?”

“It’s midday,” the old Strain stated flatly.

“Oh.” I’d been up practicing my lute until I’d passed out. Even beneath the callouses I’d painstakingly built, my fingers still ached – I must’ve slept for only a handful of hours. But with Frost growing more brutal by the day, what hours I kept barely mattered. Beyond scheduled trips to gather wood, plants, and maintain the house, we rarely ventured outside. Some sun might’ve been nice, but even unobstructed by roofs or trees it remained hidden under an inscrutable layer of grey.

“What’s the fire, greybeard?”

The appellation described Davian better than ever – in the two months we’d spent sheltering from the Frost, he’d grown a beard that almost hid the twisted contours of his face. The Strain kept it impeccably maintained – Ronnie’d once told me they’d caught him oiling it a few times. We still made fun of him for that.

The older man sighed. “Vin’s gone.”

I frowned. “You looked in- “

“Yes, Kit, I’ve had a glance around.”

I frowned. “He with Ronnie?” The giant would often cut wood at midday, and the cold demanded anyone leaving went with a partner. Only idiots and corpses travelled alone, with the first usually heralding the second.

“No, Maddie’s with them. He’s disappeared.”

I rubbed my eyes. “By all that’s good ‘n green,” I muttered quietly. “I’ll have a look. Maybe he’s squattin’ in a corner or somethin’ an’ you missed him. Vin wouldn’t do somethin’ so stupid, right?”

Davian’s brows raised. “Kit…”

“Godsdamn it, I know,” I snapped, hastily pulling my boots from beneath my bed. “I’ll be quick.”

The room I shared with Jana and the kids was clustered with detritus: carved wood toys; three ramshackle cots layered with mouldy straw; various blankets the old lady was using to instruct the kids in sewing; her favourite abacus; scatterings of bark Maddie and occasionally Vin were using in a vain attempt to teach me how to read; several piles of stinking clothes no one could be bothered to wash. It was barely large enough to fit the cots and toeing through all of it felt unnervingly like dancing some prissy noble waltz. Feeling like a fool, I grabbed some of the less rancid shirts, trousers and socks and pulled them over the underclothes I slept in. I hopped out of the room while buckling my sword onto my waist.

Our bedroom was situated on the second floor of the house – two floors more than most places I’d lived in – amidst a cluster of similar rooms. Everyone except Wil and his kid slept on this level. That seemed fair enough: he’d been the one that led us here.

At this time of day, a glance in each room revealed that everyone was out. Each door – built inside the house instead of cheaper, more sensible alternatives such as beads or blankets – took significant physical persuading to open. We usually left it fractionally open to let in hot air from the fireplace burning at the end of the hall.

Ronnie and Gast’s room was impeccably organised, though the giant’s bed was covered in a patch of Yowler’s fur. Gast’s nest of blankets and scratchy pillows lacked the signature lump that indicated she was having a midday nap. Maddie’s room was almost laughably lousy, with crumb-ridden tomes, sheafs of paper, and haphazardly discarded jewellery she’d pulled from Siik-knows-where all swarming across the ground like insects.

As I walked down the hallway, my eyes were drawn to an oval of pink wood several shades lighter than the rest of the wall. It was the pale gravestone of a mirror that had apparently hung there for decades. I’d only seen its shattered remnants.

When we had travelled a few days away from the buried crater, the cold became fierce enough to coax snow from the sky in the middle of the day. With constant wind scouring our footprints away, it became apparent that Baylar’s forces were no longer our greatest concern. Vin had been the first one to state what no one wanted to: we wouldn’t make the journey to Fort Vane without freezing to death. With the Aching having likely wiped out most man-made structures, our initial plan was to find a good spot and fortify the location as best we could. Enduring the Frost with a ramshackle shelter would see some of us without toes, but frozen corpses have little use for digits. Then Wil had woken from his coma.

He’d sold us a story. According to him, since far, far before Houses, Heartlanders had gathered in certain places in the months before they thought an Aching might come. Thousands would make the pilgrimage to these locations, where these ancient families would collate what resources they’d gathered amongst themselves and spend the ensuing quakes in ceremony and sacrifice. The large stone shelves beneath the dirt would keep them protected until they could finally emerge into a changed world.

Spires was built on one such location – the most important one, apparently, which had caused conflict with Heartlanders in its infant phase. Fort Vane was on another. And apparently, Wil’s ancestral home was on another.

I’d always thought of the man as one of the Growers. Unbeknownst to anyone else, his departed wife had been the Grower – he’d married into the family. We would have never known were it not for his own son interrogating him on the matter earnestly.

Travelling there had been an exercise in patience. Beforehand, Wil’d been a quiet enough man to make Vin look loquacious. He was still almost as mute as Ronnie except for the occasional moment he’d speak up to criticise someone. Every time I saw his disdainful face turn on anyone, supressing the urge to paint it black and blue was such a monumental task I might’ve failed were it not for the Strains pulling me back.

He'd sneered at Jana – who had seen nearly seven decades of life – for not keeping pace with people half her age. He’d done the same to Gast barely moments later in wilful ignorance of her size. He’d castigated Ronnie for struggling to light a fire, as if having two differently sized arms would make the task simple. He’d yelled at his son for crying when he fell over. Willow and Daisy had disappeared in the night after he'd screamed at them with a red-face and clenched fists -- for not stirring a pot at the exact tempo necessary. I figured they'd had their fill of loud, angry men and decided to take their chances in the renewed Heartlands. The Aching had given food enough for the next few years, but for Wil to get them to throw their lot in with a monster-infested land on the edge of Frost... I still occasionally asked him what kind of Godsblood could breed such a bastard. Even grief made a poor excuse.

I thumped him for that, after Willow and Daisy. I might’ve killed him, were Wil not even less tolerant on himself. Every time he failed to cleanly slice a log in half, or poorly sew a tear in clothing, or spend too long harvesting the strange bulbed plants Vin had found were edible, he’d swear at himself, or bat at the side of his head as if it were a faulty piece of equipment. Completely disregarding the fact he’d been marching for more than half a day, often carrying someone else’s pack on his back

He had gradually become less of a pile of flaming faeces after a few days of mood-swings, but his Oxdung still peeked out occasionally. By the time we reached his house, he was almost tolerable.

Despite possessing a mould-ridden frame lousy with cobwebs, a balcony stained by animal droppings, several missing doors, and an infestation of small rodents, the sheer scale of the place lent it an eerie gravity. Its exterior was still clad in the black bark of heartwoods, and its three-storey height – combined with a stubby tower and several chimneys waiting atop its roof – made it seem like the abandoned shell of some solemn giant.

Vin refused us entry until he’d searched the place. His excuse was that it was a prime monster den, and it was foolish to risk anyone but him. Initially, I’d thought he was joking. He’d spent the entire journey jogging up and down our line like some ragged herding dog, but that was just a matter of safety. The absurd humour tugging the edges of my mouth persisted when he threatened to tie me up, but vanished when he began yanking rope from Ronnie’s pack.

We’d argued, but his fervour quickly burned through my baffled protests. He entered, and did not return. After a quarter-hour of waiting, I went after him.

Vin’d been right: a single Godkin had taken up residence inside. Its corpse lay in what was once the dining room, amidst a collection of shattered furniture. Its too-large eyes had revealed it to be an elk-turned-Owlkin – easily the most dangerous type of monster I’d ever fought. A single wound had pierced between its antlers and into its brain.

I’d carefully checked every room on the first floor. All were typical to an isolated house, albeit in extreme disarray and disrepair – as if its inhabitants had vanished in the middle of their day. The kitchen’s floor had caved in, leaving a bloodtech stove slumped in the crawlspace beneath the house. An open satchel of salt had been left to spill on the counter. The only room that’d given me pause was what seemed to be a master bedroom. Unlike the rest of the house, everything in the room had seemed perfectly arranged. Someone had tried and failed to scrub bloodstains from its floor. That’d been the last time Wil let me see that room.

As I walked up the rickety stairs to the second storey, I’d heard an irregular series of muffled gasps. Clearing the stairwell had revealed Vin to me instantly: sat with his knees drawn to his chest. An oval of wood wobbled on the wall above him, still containing a jagged series of reflective shards. The rest were embedded deep within Vin’s knuckles. His eyes stared at nothing I could see. It had taken Davian several hours to extract all the pieces of the mirror from his mutilated fist.

The first thing we did after moving into the house was remove all its mirrors.

I tore my gaze from the pale oval and continued down the hall.

Taja’s little nook had a bunch of small carvings, practice swords, and the sweat-smeared mat where he exercised. Despite his efforts, it’d take a lot more muscle to make himself into Vin. Davian’s tiny closet was predictably empty of anything but his cot and various hunting supplies crammed beneath.

Vin’s room…

I spared Vin’s room a glance. Staring longer tended to send shudders up my spine.

I quickly stomped down the stairwell – reinforced after a boring afternoon of Wil, Ronnie and myself arguing about repairing the stairs while everyone else repaired the stairs. I swerved into the kitchen, finding Taja carefully dicing several root-vegetables we’d scavenged. I strode past him to tear open the door to the pantry: a sizeable closet stocked with various vegetables, bags of ground grain, jars of preserved fruits, smoked meats and lumps of tallow. It wasn’t unusual to find Vin meticulously sorting everything before he put lunch together.

Most of it had been gathered in the early days of Frost. Both Wil and Vin had agreed that the Aching, in exchange for a massively shortened length, had been incredibly violent. The winds’d shown little sign of abating, and we’d set about gathering as many supplies as possible before cold besieged the house. The land’s renewal had made the process absurdly simple; you couldn’t take twenty steps without stumbling over an edible root, smacking your head on a fruit, or barging into a berry bush. Preserving everything was another story.

Every single one of us – including the babies, sat upon a rock and swaddled in as many blankets as possible – had spent days outside in the cold, feeding smoking racks in a frenzy, while Vin attempted to figure out whether any of the Heartland’s bizarre red flora could be used as a preservative. Mostly by taste. Watching his face twist as he layered bizarre foods onto his tongue had even managed to get Maddie – grim-faced since the crater – chuckling.

The short Heltian had, amidst all of our poorly-stifled laughter, shouted, “Careful you don’t burn your tongue off, Vin!”

His red face – chuckling through his own discomfort – had frozen. His eyes had narrowed; he’d frowned. “Head Maleen, who…”

We hadn’t realised his irregular breaths were no longer due to what lay in his mouth. When he’d walked off into the snow-smeared woods, I’d thought he was just being a bad sport; that the work needed our attention more than an overgrown baby. Ronnie – made peripheral to the preserving process due to their mismatched arms – had been the only one to pursue.

A half-hour later had seen the giant return in a flurry of gestures only Vin – who’d memorised most at unnerving speeds – had a hope of interpreting. In his absence, they’d quickly retrieved myself and the other Strains and led us into the forest, almost falling several times in their trembling haste.

At the small stream in which Vin had stood waited a twisting of the air. Neither snow nor wind had been affected by its presence: they passed through the impossible filagree without altering their course. Similarly, the shimmering had remained mindless of its surroundings – gently flaring in the riverbed while other parts dipped in and out of the water.

Wil had told us later that this specific stream had remained mostly unaltered over the Achings, due to the stone on which it lay. He’d visited once – just to see it – and stayed away afterwards. But the flickering had endured even without his presence, and as the days went by its shape grew more steadfast. The flaring in the riverbed slowly grew into the shape of feet, while pulsing hands methodically scraped phantom cloth in and out of the water.

The ghost wasn’t always there, and it wasn’t always in the same spot. Sometimes its twin would wash at a slightly different location, often at the same time. Sometimes it appeared closer to the house. Once, on a sleepless night I’d spent sat in the dining room, I saw it moving through the kitchen. But, ignorant of snow and storm, it remained. As time progressed, the barest hint of its features became perceivable in its delicate flickering.

Initially, Vin’d tried to perform at least one Divinity to it every day. He’d carved a set of six masks to alternate through during the process – not proper Faces, but according to words we’d wheedled from him at breakfast, none of the local trees had viscous enough sap to make one. Despite his efforts to ‘send it back to the blood’, the ghost had endured. Eventually, he took to steadily copying the phantom into a small carving.

At dinner one night, Wil and he had erupted into an argument about his efforts: one spoke of the need to work for tomorrow while the other spoke of responsibility to the dead. After one monumental blowout over dinner, both silently decided not to speak of it.

Vin still wasn’t satisfied with any one depiction, but I’d managed to catch a glimpse of one of his discarded attempts. A washerwoman, broke-nosed and entering middle-age in the harshest way possible, ankle-deep in waters frozen mid-flow; her hands caught mid-air either lowering or raising a dishrag from the stream. She looked like Wil.

I wiped the frown off my face and exited the pantry.

Taja glanced up from a wispy, lump-ridden vegetable we still hadn’t found a good name for. “What are you looking for? Most of the fresher goods have been moved- ”

“-into the cold,” I finished for him. “I know, kitchen-boy. You seen Vin?”

His lips contorted at the nickname, undecided on whether to smile or scowl. “Isn’t he sleeping? He was out late.”

“You think he sleeps?” Before he could answer, I barrelled forward. “Might be somewhere in his maze of a room, though.”

“Carving, maybe,” Taja was saying, but I’d already strode past him.

As I reemerged into the hallway, the door to the house slid open several inches to eject Davian, Ronnie, and Maddie. The trio hastily shook snow from their thick cloaks while the giant Strain signed with their smaller arm. I’d learned enough to get by, but they moved at disconcerting speeds. I barely managed to catch the gesture Ronnie had commandeered for ‘Vin’ – it had originally meant ‘Turtle’, though Ronnie often attached ‘Dopey’ to either end.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“Slow down. I haven’t seen him this morning, no. He’s- “

More signs flashed by beneath Ronnie’s plaintive stare.

Davian tugged his fringe over his face. “I understand completely, but no one person had been assigned- “

Maddie tore a strand of orange hair away from her eyes. “We’re all meant to be looking after one another. And he’s been…” She gesticulated emptily.

“Precisely. It’s our collective responsibility- “ He paused. “Assigning blame is tangential. We need help searching the house.”

Taja peeked his head out of the kitchen, next to where I stood. “Vin’s missing? But…”

“Give us a hand, yeah?” I snapped – Too harsh, I immediately thought – then turned and thundered up the stairs. It only took me five heartbeats to reach his door.

I spent more than thrice that convincing myself to open it all the way.

Vin’s room had originally been spacious. Layered with faded tapestries and a thick brown carpet piled beneath a large bed, it was clearly intended to receive whatever guest was most esteemed at that moment. Jana, myself and the kids had gotten the largest guest room, but Wil had quietly insisted that Vin got the most well-appointed one. It was easy to see why. Sometimes, when I caught of his back, I remembered walking through that ruined village and seeing the corpses scattered: laying in heaps; face-down between the speartrees or looking to the clear skies. Their vacant, empty faces. Unlike me, Wil had never seen how Vin crumbled afterwards.

He'd tried to shove Maddie in the smallest room. No one could begrudge him that, but Davian’d quietly swapped with her anyway, claiming smaller spaces had a ‘meditative quality’ – whatever that meant. Wil had said nothing about that, but he hadn’t made a secret of the fact he’d throw from the house as soon as Frost began evaporating from the land.

The room Vin had gained no longer felt large. Makeshift shelves lining every wall seemed to draw the space in on itself. A desk Vin and Ronnie had dragged upstairs packed the room so tight that beyond a single, narrow chair there was no longer any space to sleep. The Blooded’s onyx blade leaned sheathed against the table’s side. Yet all of that was merely backdrop to the endless horde of carvings that blanketed every surface: holding vigil on the shelves; occupying the desk; fortifying teetering piles around the empty avenue leading to the chair.

Every person in the house had at least two wooden doppelgangers in Vin’s room. Mine leered unnervingly from a high shelf: twofold images of my own face distorted in cruel anger and spitting laughter. Dozens more figures – both Blooded and mortal – I couldn’t recognise watched as my eyes flickered around the room. Most were humanoid, excepting a dog feasting on noodles while a rugged man smiled at him, and a monstrous bipedal Foxkin. The creature held a position of prominence on his desk. An underdeveloped arm was strangled by a bracelet adorned with a wing.

Unlike the other carefully placed pieces, half-formed faces peered from massive piles of haphazardly discarded works. The majority were distorted attempts to carve six distinct figures: one that was vaguely recognisable as Tully; a dying Lizardblood; a small, nervous child; a broad-shouldered teenager wielding a sword and shield; an immense, one-armed warrior; and an eerie, featureless human. Their features were melded in bizarre ways. Most bore cracks, as if hurled fiercely.

Missing from the collection was a single figure. It had come to hold a position of prominence on the dining room’s new table after Wil had persuaded Vin to part with it. The carving depicted a broadly-built man – face weathered by long exposure to the sun – rubbing his fingers through dirt with his mouth pursed in concentration. I’d seen him before: hints of his image passed through the remnants of the fields surrounding the house, all of which lay buried beneath leaves, weeds, and the rotten remains of fences and ploughs. When standing on the fields on quieter days – where the snow fell straight and gentle – it was possible to hear the tremulous sound of his whistling and singing beneath the wind.

Like the solemn washerwoman, the carving of the farmer looked a lot like Wil.

I tore my mind back to the room.

Over Frost, Vin had taken to spending every hour unmolested by chores carving. In the last few weeks, he’d started eating alone in his room after he finished cooking, leaving the rest of us to eat without the chef. After the second day doing so, almost everyone silently agreed we needed a way to wheedle him out. Maddie couldn’t have been the one to go; conversations with her tended to leave Vin with his eyebrows furrowed, moments before he turned and walked away. Taja’d been our next pick, given how gently Vin treated the teenager, but he’d emerged from the cramped room with no success. By that point, I’d grown well and truly sick of all the cowardly creeping about we’d been doing, so I went up myself.

We’d had a kind of conversation, but only if you could call talking to an unresponsive chunk of ice a conversation. As my words – as earnest as I could manage – had rolled over his back with nothing more than grunts of acknowledgement, my tone had become jagged. I could begrudgingly accept the lack of eye-contact – for whatever reason, he’d barely looked at me since the crater – as the price of interacting with him. But he hadn’t even possessed the basic respect to stop carving his creepy statues as I spoke.

In the middle of my sentence, he’d sworn quietly and tossed a half-finished model of the washerwoman in a pile behind him. I’d snapped. My hand had been wrapped around his arm before the carving hit the ground.

As far as I’d been concerned, Vin wasn’t the kind of person to get truly angry. Sure, he’d yell and growl if you annoyed him, but even when he’d been going after… Whip’s killers, I don’t think he’d been mad. Not like I’d been. Just sad. The most furious I’d ever seen him was back at Ronnie’s place, when the Strain had signed something about him trying to die. Yet even then, he’d stopped with just a shove.

In the moment when he rose from his chair and punched me in the stomach with the force of a charging bull, I hadn’t believed he would ever stop. His eyes stared directly at my kneeling, gasping form, wide enough that I could see the capillaries within them curve back into his head. I’d read his feet and torso, and knew his hands were readying to grab me.

But he hadn’t done anything. Vin had just frozen, furious gaze fixed on me as his jaw clenched hard enough to creak. I’d stopped trying to persuade him after that.

I took several steps deeper into the room. Everything within it seemed to sit in its proper place as far as I could remember – everything except for Vin. Yet after several long moments of silent examination, I narrowed my eyes, then carefully stepped over to the man’s workstation. On the desk lay several carvings in various states of development. But the short, curved knife that Vin used to work had disappeared from its spot.

I barged out of the room and into the hallway. At its end, Gast carefully plodded down the stairs leading to the house’s stubby lookout tower, her arms heavy with Yowler. The dog’d taken to napping with her as the fat Strain looked over the land. Davian shifted his weight from foot to foot several steps above her.

I looked up as I strode past. “You see Vin leave?”

Gast nodded.

“No one with him?”

She shook her head.

I snarled. “You dumb- Why’d you not tell anyone?”

“I thought he’d return soon.”

“Why?” I barked.

“He wasn’t wearing much.”

I paused halfway down the stairs. “What was he wearing?”

“Shirt,” she said. “Pants.”

“Boots?” I asked.

“No.”

I swore violently. “Where’d he go?”

“I don’t know.”

“What- “

“It’s impossible to see through the storm, Kit,” Davian said, carefully shuffling past the large woman. “He could be anywhere. There’s simply no way of narrowing down his location.”

“Bet I know a way,” I muttered as I continued travelling down the stairs.

Above, I heard Davian ask Gast to keep an eye out in the tower.

When I reached the bottom, I swung around the banister to accelerate into the adjacent doorway and ram into the door of Wil’s room hard enough to make it shudder in its hinges. The impact jarred enough composure into my body for me to eye it nervously – I didn’t have the skill or the chits to replace its metal hinges – yet that vanished as the door cracked open.

Wil stood on the other side, his bare torso drenched in sweat. He was just a hair shorter than me – though I could’ve sworn he’d been smaller a few months ago. Behind him, his boy stood beside a straw mat surrounded by several stones that I belatedly recognised from Taja’s room. He and his boy had just been exercising, and by my reckoning according to a routine Vin devised.

I leaned sideways to get a better look in the room, only for Wil’s arm to stretch upwards and grab the doorway – blocking my view.

My eyes darted towards his. “You know where Vin is?” I demanded.

He held my gaze, but frowned. “Vin’s missin’?”

“Yeah.”

“Why would I- “

I ground my teeth. “I’d bet a sack ‘o silver he’s gone after yer ghosts. He’s nowhere near by – Gast would’ve seen him – so where’d do them spirits o’ yours gather?”

His next words emerged slowly. “What do you mean, my ghosts?”

“They look just like you,” I snapped. “Out with it.”

The worn man paused, eyes listing upwards as he tried to conjure a response.

I shook my head disbelievingly. “You go out an’ watch that farmer bastard wherever he shows up.” A scoff escaped my mouth. “Try to check what yer tryin’ to sell me, cause it smells rotten.”

Wil sighed. “My father’s no bastard, Kit.”

“Alright. Woman’s yer mother?”

He flinched. “That doesn’t matter.”

An eyebrow rose up my forehead. “…Sure. Well, Vin seems t’love them ghosts o’ yours. I reckon he’s gone after ‘em.”

“What do you want- “

The wind rattled the walls of the house. “Where’d they die, Wil?”

Wil’s lips twisted.

I found mine contorting in turn. “We don’t have time.” My arm gestured expansively towards a shuttered window at the end of the hall, quivering beneath the boards we hammered over it. “He’s gonna die out there if no one gets him.”

His mouth made shapes, but none emerged.

I lowered my head closer to his while raising my hands to grasp at empty air. “Give me somethin’.”

“He’s not at my father’s grave,” the worn man admitted.

“How’d you- “

“He’s not. But my mother’s… He’d have no way of knowing where it is.”

Graves were rare in the Heartlands, but I supposed the stone shelves beneath the area kept bodies safe enough, barring any digging animals. “They’re not buried together?”

His mouth straightened into a thin line. “No.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“Vin couldn’t’ve- “

“You an’ I got no idea what Vin could or couldn’t do,” I said quickly. “Man’s stepped straight out of a godsdamn song. Tell me.”

His eyes locked on an empty patch of air.

“Tell me.”

“Past the stream,” he whispered. “Twixt the trees. That’s all I know.”

I stared at him, mouth slightly open to demand more information. His eyes flicked away from my own.

“Thanks,” I told him, then turned and rushed over to the front door.

Wind whistled behind its thick wood, powerful enough to push our doorstop several inches away from its original place. Careful to avoid slipping on the melted snow covering the entryway, I reached to one of the hooks embedded in the wall and yanked one of the thicker cloaks around my neck. Footsteps padded behind me as I tried to hook its mismatched clasps together.

“Did Wil have any ideas?” Davian’s old voice rasped.

Several thumps sounded on the ceiling as people scurried through the second floor. I heard Taja ask Crumpet whether she knew where Vin was. Judging from the indignant croak that echoed through the house, they were probably from the filthy room we’d cajoled a feral goat into the week after we’d first entered. Without the temperamental creature, Wil’s babies would’ve starved.

Elsewhere, Jana insulted Ronnie’s attempts to ask questions with all the eloquence of a bard and the savagery of a mutt frothing from mushrooms. Usually, I’d go up and wrestle in the verbal mud with the washed-up old whore over such transgressions, but there was no time.

“Some,” I told Davian, drawing a thick pair of mittens over my hands.

“Is he nearby?” the Strain asked.

Behind me, Maddie stomping down the stairs.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Excuse me: ‘maybe’?” Davian asked. “Do you know where he is or not?”

“Wil’s sayin’ he’s past the stream,” I snapped, twisting my neck to glare at the old Strain’s inscrutable visage. “Tween some trees.”

Most of the forestry nearby had been removed by generations of Wil’s family. Finding more meant venturing to where heartwoods and speartrees curled around the edges of the stone shelf like the teeth of a protruding maw.

Maddie began attempting to tug a cloak from the pegs. Her small frame made it difficult. “That’s a large area.”

I looked down at her fruitless pulling. “Princess, the storm’s heavier ‘n- “

“You need the- “

“Wait for Ronnie, yeah?”

She looked up at me and scowled. A sudden smile broke over my face. I raised my hand to cover it. “Okay,” she spat.

I reached up and pulled down the cloak she was going for, then turned to venture out the doorway.

“Stop,” Davian muttered. “Stop!”

I whirled; teeth bared. “What.”

“Don’t go out there.”

“I can handle the cold for- “

He shook his head. “This isn’t about the snow or the Frost, Kit.”

My eyes narrowed. “You mean… Vin?”

He nodded.

“Davian,” I warned, “even a Lizardblood can’t- “

“No, Kit,” he tentatively began. “He’s no simple Lizardblood. I’ve known him for over a year now, and since I’ve met him Vin has always been the type of man to keep his cards close to his chest.”

“That’s nothin’ t’be- “

“But now,” he interrupted, “some part of him’s come undone. We all know it. It’s as if even he doesn’t know what hand he’s drawn. He’s not safe.”

There was a pause as I struggled to find something to say. A fist would be quicker; simpler. But it couldn’t do anything but make him more scared.

“Sure,” I said, carefully feeling out the words, “he never made much sense to me. But he’s still laughing. Still makes jokes.”

He rubbed his eyes. “He breaks things, too. And even with something in his skull slowly dissolving, Vin’s body remains as strong as ever. He has always – unbeknownst to any of us – been able to kill every single person around him. I…”

I waited; teeth clenched.

Davian’s dark eyes locked tentatively on my own. Their pupils quivered. “I’m no longer sure I trust him not to.”

I clamped my eyes shut.

“I’ll go with Maddie.” My eyes flickered open. “But you stay near my markers, and if you find him please, please be careful.”

I opened my mouth, then closed it. Before I walked into the storm, all I could manage was a nod.

The cold hit me like a brick the moment I began trudging through the snow.

Frost was always dangerous. One of my earliest memories was of watching the camp’s cook grip his blackened toe and slowly slide a knife into the skin, then slice it cleanly off with practiced ease. Man’d ended up living for another eight years, until the moment he’d been knifed in the gut by a boy we’d robbed. He never got his toe back.

I remembered days where the adults huddled around a fire to talk, Mother and Jana – the scarring on the madam’s face so fresh you could almost see the spurned lover casting acid over her – both stern-faced. Days later, one of the older lads had returned with a small body dusted with flakes of ice. The child’s mother had wept, while I’d tried and failed to comprehend what happened to my friend.

Fire could ward the cold away, but the white death still held its patient, inexorable vigil around the edges of the flames, waiting for the moment the temporal nature of heat ate itself into cold once again. Frost never passed without taking something.

Yet as I stumbled through the snow, feeling it dig into the initial layers of my skin and then eating deeper, the constant howling of wind slowed, then finally ceased. I looked up from my boots to track the next yellow strip of cloth – part of a network Davian had tied around trees, shrubs, and roots for thousands of paces in every direction – and found the air crystal clear.

Snow-covered fields sprawled around the edges of the house, fading into a long stream before vanishing entirely in the distant tree-line. All the pettier flora and fauna were interred beneath the endless white blanket. The ubiquitous crimson of the Heartlands was smothered. Nothing progressed in Frost. But nothing would decay. Everything, from the most precious children to the cruellest of tyrants, would be perfectly preserved in the moments of their death.

Even ghosts.

Trudging through the knee-deep snow brought little more than an ache in my legs and lungs, while the cold slowly penetrated my bones. When I felt sweat prickling at my torso despite the numbing of my legs, I doubled my pace, fearful that the beads would end up freezing to my body. As I grew closer to the stream and my eyes marked nothing – no tracks or broken sticks – I became increasingly certain I would need to turn back and travel a different direction.

Then my eyes were drawn towards something twisting in the air. Colour flared in icy flickers as two silhouettes – mindless of the snow falling through the bodies – carried something through the stream. Their legs dipped through its frozen surface to wade through water that no longer flowed, then staggered up the opposite bank.

I knew Vin would’ve followed them.

I staggered behind them as they walked into the trees, struggling to maintain the pace they’d set on some hot, snowless day. I fumbled for the hilt of my sword, and when my numb fingers failed to detect anything but cold, I beat sensation back into them on the side of my leg. My trudging gradually lagged behind the two. While I huffed with the effort of accelerating one of the two figures dropped their burden in a sparking of crimson and turned away. In the absence of wind, I heard the whisper of someone’s sobs.

The shattered fragments of the ghosts drew together as the weeper was slammed against a tree – its trunk fallen in the present day. The other shape had abandoned their burden beneath the snow and mouthed words in stern tones. As the weeper turned his head away, only to have it twisted back by the other’s hands, I saw the features of the two for the first time.

The stern man was the old farmer – Wil’s father. The one who’d wept bore a face absent of the wrinkles I was accustomed to seeing. It was a younger Wil.

My foot caught on a hidden chunk of ice and I fell into the snow. It was strangely comfortable. My sluggish mind noted that fact, then sparked with manic fear. For a moment, I violently flailed for traction before managing to shove myself back onto my feet. A violent shiver wracked my body, which forced a fraction more warmth into my bones.

When I regained my composure, the ghosts were gone.

“Raven’s bloody bones,” I swore, teeth chattering. “Damn. Damn.”

My eyes searched for any sign that would betray a passing, but the fast-falling snow allowed nothing. My ears found Vin instead.

A harsh, guttural bellow echoed through the trees. Almost as soon as it began, it was strangled into nothing.

I twisted, trying to track the sound before it faded completely.

Another scream set my legs moving.

I ran through the frozen forest, struggling to force my legs to cooperate as the strangled howls melted into long silences, then erupted again to shatter the quiet to pieces. Excessive panting dug ice-cold air into my throat, but despite finding a kind of rhythm in my gait my lungs quickly began burning. Above my head frozen streams of sap hung from branches while the strange new plants the Aching had brought drooped under the weight of snow. One broke apart when my reckless sprint drove my shoulder into its stem.

Then a clearing opened in the forest, where a figure sat in front of the snow-smeared remnants of a campfire. His body – clad in nothing more than a shirt and pair of trousers – seemed like some kind of sculpture. The ice upon his shoulders crackled as he turned to face me.

“Jackal,” Vin greeted. “Come to finish what you started?”

Pointing that name towards me felt like a knife in the gut. “What?”

His jaw trembled. “Do me the decency of dropping the act. Don’t pretend- “

My vision caught on a splash of colour on his arm. “Blood, Vin, what happened?”

His forearms were drenched in strange black liquid. Yet what truly shocked me were the three pebble-sized caverns embedded in his arms. A thin string of gore hung limply from two, resolving in a clean cut.

An eyeball hung from the third string.

I gagged.

“Kit?” In his hand, his curved carving dagger waited, covered in black, sap-like liquid. “Kit?”

“What is that?” A tremor travelled through my voice.

He flinched and covered the holes. “Nothing,” he muttered, eyes flicking away. “I’m getting rid of them.”

I looked at them – the strange, empty eye-sockets carved where none should be. My eyes darted away from the image, then found two eyeballs laying in the snow. I retched.

Vin turned away from me, head leaning down over a patch of ground as he reversed his grip on the knife. He flinched when he saw what lay between his feet.

“Vin?” I whispered.

“I’m getting rid of it,” he stated, more firmly.

I rounded the side of the campfire to find his head bowed over a frozen puddle. He drew the knife closer to his face and tucked its tip underneath one of his eyeballs. The eyeball’s iris was a darker black that its counterpart.

Before I could allow myself to think, I lunged for the knife and used my entire body-weight to yank his arm downwards. There was a moment were Vin braced one arm with the other, arresting its fall entirely.

I locked eyes with him. “Don’t,” I told him. “Please.”

His arm tensed and I almost went for my sword. But he simply let the knife drop to the ground, where I kicked it into the trees.

Vin’s hands clutched the side of his head. “Gods, what is happening? What am I?”

“You- ” I licked my lips. My teeth chattered. “You’re you.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head, “no. I’m a… A pair of grasping hands, and a bag full of severed heads. And feet.” He scoffed quietly at that.

Somehow, my mind seized upon the village and the countless corpses that he’d laid upon the hill. I’d never been bothered by killing. But Vin wasn’t me.

“You don’t have to…” The thought struck me that I’d completely misinterpreted his words. I continued anyway. “It’s not too late. You don’t have to keep- ”

“That’s not how time works, Kit.” His words were quiet and broken. “It’s not. I’ll always be on the battlefield; beneath the roof; under an axe; on the mound; too little, too late. Nothing will ever change that. I don’t want to be here anymore.”

He bent over on himself, clutching his wounded arms. A strangled groan bubbled from his throat. “I don’t want to be this man,” he spat furiously.

“Let’s go back.” I leaned forward to awkwardly hover a hand over his shoulder.

“I don’t want to be this man,” he hissed, fingernails dragging down the sides of his arms.

“Okay,” I breathed. “Okay. I understand. I’m sorry. Calm down.”

His eyes looked at me, manic and pleading. “I don’t want to be this man.” His nails ripped into the eye-sockets of his arm and tore into flesh.

I fumbled for words; for actions; for anything.

“Get me out,” he whispered. “Get me out!”

For the briefest instant, the shock of the moment caused me to see him afresh. A large man curled in on himself, dark skin and mismatched eyes trembling like some frightened animal. His onyx hair was matted together by sweat and wrapped beneath a stained patchwork bandana.

I blinked, and realised he looked fractionally different from the person I’d met months ago. Writ into his dark skin were even darker veins. The fresh wounds on his arm oozed blood the colour of night.

I swallowed. “You’re the Ravenblood?”

A sound somewhere between a chuckle and a sob escaped him. “Yeah,” he breathed, turning his head up to stare at the falling snow. “I believe I am.”