Syla hunched forward on the bench, muscles locked against the bite of the draft. Her teeth clattered like loose stones in a miner’s cart. “It’s cold,” she rasped, her voice brittle. “Gods, Varnok… it’s so cold.” From the bed, young Hanne whimpered, a thin, fragile sound that quickly dissolved into violent, uncontrollable tremors. The boy beside her began to cough, a wet rattle that echoed the rasping of dry leaves underfoot.
“Survival isn’t about fire,” Varnok stated, his voice flat and low, cutting through the rising panic. “It’s about what you take from the cold, and what you give it.” He moved with a practiced economy of motion, tearing at loose floorboards near the collapsed stove. The wood groaned, splitting easily in the sub-zero chill. Beneath, the earth was a hard, packed loam, just soft enough to work. “This is a grave, or it’s a cradle. Your choice.”
Syla stared down into the exposed crawlspace. “What are you doing?”
Varnok ignored her, pulling away another board. The frigid air rushed up from the gap, yet felt almost milder than the room’s ambient chill. “The ground holds the heat you lose. It holds it longer than the air.” He pointed to the small forms on the bed. “Bring them.”
Reluctantly, Syla stumbled over, gathering her two offspring into her arms. Their tiny bodies were already stiffening, their faces pale as winter berries. Varnok scooped handfuls of powdery snow from the floor where it had drifted in through cracks, packing it into the newly exposed earth beneath the cabin. He then demonstrated, meticulously wrapping Hanne in a thick pelt he’d salvaged from a corner, tucking the edges tight around her neck and feet, leaving only her nose exposed. He did the same for the boy, pressing both fur-wrapped bodies into the shallow depression he had hollowed out. He then began to carefully shovel loose earth and fine snow over them, creating small, snug hollows.
“The snow acts as insulation. The earth below will leach what little heat they have, but it will leech it slowly. It will keep them from the wind, from the air, from the speed of the freeze,” Varnok explained, his hands moving with the precision of a craftsman. “They will be cold. But they will live. If they stay here, they will die. Quickly.” He finished packing the last of the snow, leaving only a small, breath-sized gap near their faces, then motioned for Syla to lay another pelt over the top, creating a small, breathing mound within the earth.
Syla knelt by the makeshift grave, her hands hovering over the mounded furs. “My husband…” she began, her voice raw. “He’s still alive. I can hear him.”
From the blackened, root-entangled remains of the stove, a low, guttural groan emanated. The thing that had once been Syla’s husband, Elvar, twitched, a branch-like protrusion scraping against the iron of the stove. “The cold… it is… a mercy…” the fractured voice rasped, each word a desperate wrenching from a mouth of bark and splintered teeth. “Varnok… shatter me… please…”
Syla recoiled, a gasp tearing from her lips. “What are you saying? You want to die?”
“Better… to break… than to burn…” Elvar’s voice weakened, the plea a ragged whisper. “She… she will burn me again… I know it… the cold… end it… end this…”
Varnok looked from the buried small ones to the pleading, agonized husk of Elvar. The creature’s plea matched the cold reckoning Varnok had carried across the ice. Extinguish every fire. Let the guilty freeze entirely. And then, shatter their petrified remains. That was the path. That was how the blight truly broke, how the Yul-Gorek’s curse would be severed, not merely contained. The cold was not just a weapon against the smoke; it was the anvil upon which the curse itself would be reforged into nothingness.
He met Elvar’s desperate gaze. “I will consider it,” Varnok said, his voice devoid of pity, yet carrying a grim promise. He knew what he had to do. The burning had to stop. The smoke had to cease. The guilty had to become inert, brittle monuments to their own sin. And then, they had to be broken into dust.
Syla, still kneeling by the buried children, suddenly let out a piercing scream. Her fingers had been tracing the nape of Hanne’s neck through the fur, trying to feel for a heartbeat. Her fingers snapped back from the fur, curling tight against her collar. “No,” she shrieked, a high, disbelieving sound that clawed at the air. “Gods, no! It’s… it’s starting! On their skin… I can feel it… like rough bark…”
Varnok moved with an instant, brutal efficiency, tearing the fur away from Hanne’s exposed neck. In the scant light filtering through the grimy window, he saw it. A faint, greenish discoloration, a subtle roughening of the tender skin. Not yet the full, branching blight, but the undeniable, horrifying precursor. The smoke had already begun its work. The children were not safe. The frost had not come soon enough for them. The sixth night was upon them, and the time for extinguishing fires was rapidly running out.