Chapter Text
The cold wind swept harshly through a rolling sea of pure white snow, flurries whipped up by wind as shadows shifted among the sparse trees, above, evershifting lights danced and spun above in the dark, star dappled sky. In that vast and endless dusk, a lone figure moved across the tundra.
His breath steamed in the thin air, his footfalls breaking the crusted frost with the crunch of old bones. His armor, black and grey, was scarred with the tales of a hundred hunts — the marks of claws, the bite of acid, the scrape of something far older than steel. A wolf’s pelt hung from his shoulder, its eyes replaced with dull amber glass that glowed faintly in the dark.
He was Eirik.
Once, he had been more than this, something greater, something terrible.
Now he was simply the Huntsman.
Ahead, the snow moved. No — it shifted. Something vast and low crept across the drifts, a ripple in the world’s pale hide. The Shade Beast. Born of Fenris’ night, its flesh drank light, its breath curdled the air into fog.
Eirik’s hand brushed the hilt of his frostblade. The old runes carved into its surface whispered like voices through thin ice.
He exhaled.
For a heartbeat, everything was still.
Even the wind seemed to hold its breath.
Then the ground exploded.
The Shade Beast burst upward, a mass of sinew and smoke, all teeth and hunger. It struck with impossible speed — a blur of claws that could shear ceramite, and Eirik met it halfway.
The first impact broke the calm like thunder.
The beast’s claws raked his pauldron, peeling back metal and flesh alike. He drove his knee into its flank, shoving the creature off-balance just long enough to carve a ragged arc through its chest. Ichor hissed where it hit the snow. The stench was burnt ozone and copper.
It lunged again. This time, it bit deep — fangs locking around his forearm. Bone splintered. Eirik roared, not in pain, but in defiance, the sound rolling across the wastes like a storm. He jammed his sword up through the creature’s gullet and tore free his ruined arm in a spray of frost and black blood.
For a moment, neither moved.
The beast collapsed, dissolving into mist as its life fled it.
Eirik dropped to one knee, clutching his arm. He could already feel the cold closing in, dulling the agony. Around him, the snow began to fall again, as if the world were covering the wound it had made.
He stared at the steaming ichor that once was his prey.
And, for just a moment, in the reflection of that dying light, he thought he saw another world — bright, warm, alive.
The wind carried his answer away into the night.
“So… another hunt awaits, then.”
The snow buried the last traces of the beast, and of him, too, as the storm rose.