❄︎ The Beasts of the North ❄︎
Morning came without sunlight.
The sky was an iron sheet, and the air so cold it seemed to hum. Frost had formed on the men’s beards while they slept, sealing their lips like glass until they tore it free. The fire had died in the night. No one spoke much as they rekindled it, feeding the last of their wood into the coals.
Brann said, “Something moved around camp after you slept. I heard it. Heavy. Slow.”
Harlo scowled, his face gaunt and gray. “I told you, there’s things out there. I saw shapes past the cliffs — crawling things, low to the ground.”
“Seal or bear, maybe,” said Brann.
“Then why did it breathe like a man?”
The wind answered for them — a long sigh through the icefields, low and strange.
Christopher said nothing. He stood at the edge of camp, staring at the tracks Brann had found earlier. Wide, deep, and too symmetrical to belong to anything he knew. Not claws, not hooves. More like… hands.
They set a watch that day. Two men with rifles salvaged from the Gannet, their breath fogging the air as they scanned the horizon.
By nightfall, the unease had sharpened into a kind of fever. Every sound became a threat — the crack of ice, the groan of the wind, the whisper of snow.
When the first scream came, it was almost a relief.
Harlo’s cry ripped through the night — high, sudden, cut short. The men leapt to their feet, weapons ready. Brann swung the lantern toward the sound, its light flickering over the white expanse beyond camp.
Nothing. Only a trail of disturbed snow leading into the dark.
“Gods…” one of the sailors breathed. “He’s gone.”
Then they heard it — a low, wet rasping noise. Something between a growl and a sigh. It came from beneath them.
The ice shuddered.
Christopher barely had time to shout before the ground split open and something erupted upward — a blur of pale limbs and black teeth. It struck one of the men full in the chest and dragged him down screaming. Blood spattered across the snow like ink on parchment.
“Fire! Fire, damn you!” Brann roared.
Gunshots cracked through the cold. The creature reeled, shrieking, and vanished into the dark with impossible speed.
Silence fell again — but it was a listening silence, as though the world itself were waiting.
Christopher’s breath came in ragged bursts. He looked around — four men left. Brann bleeding from the arm, one rifle jammed, another empty.
Then, from beyond the firelight, came a sound that froze every soul to the bone.
Laughter.
Not human — too broken, too deep. Like the echo of a voice trying to remember how to sound alive.
It came from several throats at once.
Shapes began to emerge from the mist. Dozens of them, pale as bone, their skin stretched thin over long limbs. Their eyes gleamed like frozen stars.
Brann whispered, “Saints preserve us…”
Christopher drew his axe, the haft slick with frost. “No saints here.”
The beasts closed in.
Gunfire and screams tore the night apart. Men fell, dragged into the snow. Brann went down fighting, a blade buried in the throat of one of the creatures before another took him from behind.
Christopher swung until his arms burned, until the axe haft split and his hands bled. Then — silence again.
When he lifted his head, the beasts were gone. The camp was wreckage. Fire sputtered in the snow. Bodies half-buried.
He was alone.
Far off, on the ridge above the frozen shore, he saw the creatures silhouetted against the aurora — a host of shadows watching him with eyes like dying coals.
And though he could not hear their speech, he understood what it meant.
You are ours now.
