Varnok stared at the faint green film creeping across Hanne’s neck. The tender skin showed pebbled ridges under the soot. Syla curled over her second child, murmuring useless vows against the bare timber. Varnok turned away, his stomach knotting into a hard lump.
He moved, not with haste, but with an unyielding purpose. “Stay with them,” he commanded Syla, his voice stripped of all inflection. “Keep them beneath the snow. Do not light another spark. Not one.” He didn’t wait for her response, nor did he offer comfort. There was no time for either. The cabin reeked of damp rot and sweet sap. He pulled the heavy, snow-crusted door open, the creak loud in the sudden silence, and stepped back into the killing frost of Osk-Vallen.
The settlement was a collection of shadowed hulks beneath the pale, spectral glow of the Auroric Veil. Every vent exhaled bile-colored vapor into the black air. He had spent winters alone on the sheet ice; his skin barely registered the bite that killed other men. The settlement had forgotten how to endure without burning wood.
Jorik shuffled out of the cabin behind him, his movements stiff. The hunter’s face was a mask of deepening pallor, his breath pluming in ragged gasps. The heavy leather gloves he wore now seemed less like concealment and more like restraints, the unseen branches within pushing, warping. “Where now?” Jorik rasped, his voice sounding like stones grinding together. “More fires?”
Varnok didn’t look back. “All of them,” he stated, his voice a low growl that carried on the wind. “Every last ember. Starting with the closest.”
He stalked through the deserted lanes, the wind whipping at his heavy furs, the snow crunching under his boots like broken bone. The first hut, a low turf mound belonging to the elder trapper, poured out a thick, oily column. Varnok drove his heel into the door latch, splintering the frame. Inside, the old trapper scrambled back from an iron grate where he had been shoving black, knotty fragments shaped like human shins.
“Step back,” Varnok said. The old man hissed, frantic under the creeping rot, and lunged. His fingers had hardened into blunt stakes, clawing at Varnok’s coat to drag him back from the grate. Jorik, with a surprisingly agile lunge, intercepted Rorlag, his own blighted arm snapping forward and wrapping around the old man’s chest. Bark crunched against bark as Jorik locked both arms around the trapper's ribs. The old man choked on his own tongue while Varnok hurled two shovels of crusted drifts into the grate, drowning the greenish embers in sour steam.
They repeated the process, cabin after cabin. Some villagers lashed out, their joints thick with gray lichen. Others simply stared from their blankets, too stiff to rise as Varnok shoveled drift-ice over their grates. Jorik trailed behind him like an animated fence-post, using his thickened forearms to pin down anyone who lunged. Each strike stiffened the hunter's joints, sap leaking where his knuckles split.
“The hall,” Jorik wheezed, lifting an arm toward the main timber hall, where the center roof-pipe vented an oily column toward the stars. “The timbermen moved the coals inside. Everyone left went there.”
If the curse had taken root in the hall, those men were already lost, but Syla's children were still flesh.
A low thrum shook the double doors of the hall, which hung crooked on their iron straps, leaking pale green light across the yard. Varnok shoved through into heat and stink. Thirty woodcutters, their jaws and ears crusted in ribbed grain, crowded the broad stone pit. They tossed broken benches, tool shafts, and gray, severed arms straight into the coals. The fumes smelled of tallow and burning pine gum, painting yellow shapes against the roof beams.
A ragged bellow went up from the circle. “The ice-dog!” one shrieked, his arm ending in a thick, knobbly branch. “He comes for our fire!”
“Kill him! Keep him away from the fire!” another yelled, and the crowd surged forward in a crush of knotty limbs and dull axes. Varnok could not cut through twenty men to reach the pit alone.
“Go!” Jorik suddenly screamed, his voice ripped from a chest that was now more tree than man. He lunged, not at Varnok, but directly into the heart of the onrushing mob. His arms, now thick, bark-covered branches, swept out, catching two loggers and sending them sprawling. A third he impaled on a newly sprouted spike from his forearm, holding the struggling man aloft. “Go, Varnok! The fire pit! Put it out!”
Axes hacked into Jorik's sides, thudding as if striking seasoned oak. He was a barrier, a living, groaning wall of sacrifice. Varnok didn’t hesitate. He ducked past swinging clubs, shoving through the press toward the pit. He saw Jorik’s body being overwhelmed, saw new branches erupting from his back, pinning attackers beneath him, his face a rictus of final agony. But he held them, just long enough.
Varnok hit the stone curb of the pit, where flames boiled high toward the roof flue. He gripped the heavy, iron fire-rake, its head still glowing from the heat, and swung it like a madman, tearing at the stone flue, at the earthen base. Sparks showered his furs, but the iron barely scraped the deep bed of coals. In the shadows by the wall sat three brim-full brine tuns. He didn’t care if it made a mess, if it brought scalding steam. He needed it out. He drove his shoulder into the nearest cask, overturning fifty gallons of slush across the red embers. Steam erupted in a deafening hiss. He rolled the second tub over the lip, then dragged the third down into the center. The woodcutters shrieked through the gray cloud, clawing toward the guttering coals.
Varnok backed out through the boiling mist, coughing soot, to find the pit drowned in black muck. The heat collapsed instantly beneath the draft whistling down the roof flue. Gray ash settled into stillness. The loggers, still tangled with Jorik’s now-motionless, petrified form, froze. Not with fear, but with an unnatural, sickening speed. Without fire, the lake cold plunged into the room like dropped iron. A low, continuous *crack-pop-snap* filled the air. It was the sound of joints seizing, of tendons tearing, of sap-filled vessels bursting as their bodies, already half-wood, yielded to the impossible chill. Their pupils frosted over white as their cheeks stiffened into pale, bark-covered timber beside Jorik's frozen mass. They were not merely dying of cold. They were becoming the forest, rooted and eternal, in a single, horrifying instant.