The snow hadn't broken yet.
Arvid moved like he was part of the tree line, no crunch beneath his boots, no rustle of fabric. Only the faint whisper of wool brushing against his rifle strap. Even the wind didn't notice him.
The forest stretched wide in all directions, painted white and gray, the branches low with the weight of the season. It was early enough that the light hadn't fully risen, casting the pines in long, drowsy shadows. A soft layer of fresh powder coated the ground, undisturbed. No prints but his.
He liked mornings like this. Nothing out of place. Nothing to fix.
His hand brushed against the worn leather satchel at his side. Inside were spare trap components, a length of wire, and a small folded cloth soaked in oiled powder, tools that had saved more lives than they'd taken. He moved past an old pine, eyes drifting to its base.
Second trap. Still set.
He knelt beside it briefly, brushing away the snow that had lightly settled on the trigger point. No sign of disturbance. Nothing had come this way in the night.
Good.
He stood and pressed forward.
Past the second ridge, the terrain sloped downward, just enough to cause careless travelers to slide. Arvid took the route sideways, one foot placed with absolute control after the other. His eyes moved faster than his steps. He noted claw scratches on a low barked trunk, a trail of frozen scat from something fox-sized, and the subtle dip in a snowbank that meant a burrowing animal had risen and fled long before dawn.
Everything here told a story.
And he had learned to read it like scripture.
It wasn't until he reached the third waypoint, a crooked cedar near the dried-up stream, that he paused.
He crouched low beside a shallow snow pit and reached forward with his gloved fingers. Brushed. Tested the firmness.
Nothing fresh.
But something else caught his eye.
Farther down the hill, two small branches broken low, in the opposite direction of windfall.
Not recent.
But not old, either.
He narrowed his eyes.
The broken branches led downhill, toward a small clearing hemmed in by dense thickets of pine. Snow had collected in uneven dips across the floor, but Arvid saw the trail for what it was, a shallow path, half-sunken prints leading toward a narrow gully carved between frozen roots.
He crouched low behind a dead log, breath steady.
There.
Just beyond the rise, a silhouette moved.
It wasn't large. Not enough to draw alarm from the city, but enough to kill a traveler or tear through a livestock cart. Four-legged. Heavy frame. Striped hide, patchy with recent molting. Arvid could tell from the way its shoulders swayed, it was a Stalker-type beast. Meant for ambushes. Sharp reflexes. Terrible hearing.
And lucky for it, terrible timing.
Arvid didn't move right away.
He studied the slope of its flank, the twitch in its hind leg, the way its nostrils flared lazily without catching any scent.
Wind was on his side.
So was silence.
Slowly, he drew the rifle from his back. No sound. His fingers checked the chamber. Loaded. The stock was cold against his glove as he raised it.
He didn't breathe.
Didn't blink.
His eye aligned through the open iron sights, never a scope. Arvid Lumi never used one. Distance meant nothing if your hands remembered the wind better than glass.
He waited one half-second longer.
The beast turned slightly.
Its side opened.
Arvid's finger squeezed.
CRACK.
The sound cut the quiet clean. Sharp, not loud. The shot bent with the wind, adjusted mid-air, then curved precisely through a narrow slot behind the beast's shoulder blade.
It didn't roar. It just dropped.
One breath. One shot. That was the point.
He didn't stand right away.
He listened.
Waited.
No other movement in the trees. No echo of wings. No scent on the air except powder and pine sap.
He rose, slung the rifle back into place, and walked toward the fallen body.
It was dead before it hit the snow.
He marked the kill mentally, position, trajectory, likely origin of its tracks. Nothing unusual. No signs of a pack. No strange bruising, no mutated flesh. Just another predator, pushing too close to the fringe of the ridge.
Arvid turned without a word and began the long walk home.
***
The cabin stood just as he'd left it.
Its chimney exhaled a thin coil of smoke that twisted into the sky, too faint to be seen from town. A single shutter on the left window creaked softly in the wind. The snow hadn't yet covered the small footprints leading to the front step, Anna's, most likely, from their last visit.
Arvid paused before the door.
His breath curled upward once, then disappeared.
He stepped inside.
The warmth hit him gently, faint embers still in the stove. He moved with practiced stillness, stripping off gloves, unfastening the rifle sling, hanging his coat on the peg beside the door. The cabin smelled faintly of paper, oil, and dried pine resin.
Then he saw the letter.
A single folded note, tucked neatly on the center of the table. A second slip of parchment rested on top, smaller, thinner, with tighter handwriting scrawled across it in a diagonal line:
"You owe me a meal for this delivery. Preferably something that's not dried venison."
—Lilya
He didn't smile, exactly.
But the corners of his mouth twitched like a thought nearly escaped.
He picked up both notes, set Lilya's aside, and unfolded the larger letter.
Anna's words burst out first. They danced over the page like her voice, talking about Crystalis lights, and the huge bread she saw in the market, and a violin player who played "something sad and beautiful" outside the tavern last night. She wrote about how she and Ilya got lost in the alleyways but found their way back with Dima's help, and how the innkeeper made them stew that was better than anything she had ever tasted.
Beneath it, smaller writing.
Tighter. Controlled.
"City's too loud. Too many people. Anna likes it, somehow."
Arvid stared at the words a long moment.
Then read them again.
He sat down at the table. Set the letter aside. Reached for the pen.
And paused.
There was a sound.
Soft at first.
Not a crack or a snap, but something stranger. A pull, like the air in the room had suddenly turned inward.
He froze.
Set the pen down.
Listened.
Another sound. Louder now. A pressure shift. The kind you feel more than hear, like a storm folding the sky.
His eyes flicked toward the door.
Then it hit.
A snap from above, sharp and monstrous. Not thunder. Not wind. Something faster. The air itself seemed to shift, slammed downward through the walls.
Arvid rose without a word, moved to the door, and swung it open.
Snow exploded into the entryway.
The wind that met him wasn't natural. It wasn't cold, it was cut. Sharp, tearing. The trees outside bowed violently as if trying to crawl from the roots.
Overhead—
Something moved.
He caught only the blur of it. No clear shape. Just a massive shadow, long and wide, streaking across the clouds like a scar. The sound that followed was delayed, but deafening. A sonic crack that shattered the air, rolled across the forest like a blast wave.
Arvid didn't blink.
He stepped back once, then grabbed his rifle, his coat, his scarf in one motion.
He looked to the sky again.
It was heading west.
Crystalis.
He didn't hesitate.