There was silence again. The same, yet somehow different. A silence that spoke. A silence that betrayed their fear.

“What do we do?” replied Baba, relying on the stoicism of a Chersonese adventurer to get them through this.

“That depends if we can work out where it is. We can’t travel until we know. We need to leave our packs here. If we’re caught with a pack on we’re dead meat. We need to be agile.”

Agile? Thought Baba. She was freezing to the bone from the minutes spent laying in the snow, and the sun was only getting lower.

“Okay.” She said “Okay. So we need to look for the hail, right?”

Perry was impressed, and wished the situation allowed him to take the time to express that.

A Wendigo is a creature of hunger and ice. A human who succumbed to cannibalism and who is cursed to die for the sin. But, in death, their body preserves in ice. Magic binds their flesh to the cold, their skin turns blue and their limbs grow with every meal they catch in their new un-death.

All Wendigos have an aura of hail. Sometimes as thin as a mist, other times as if coming from the sky itself. There was a tall tale in the Enmerkar forest that The First Wendigo amassed so much ice that they plunged an entire dungeon into permafrost.

Time passes.

It could have been a few minutes, it could have been an hour. In the bitter chill of the Chersonese winter, Perry and Baba struggled to stay conscious. Even if the Wendigo had never found them, their chance of survival would still had been low…

…but it did.

The first they heard was a thumping, a great rhythmic thumping as if they were listening to the hooves of a Harmattan caravan. The softness of the noise was deceitful. The weight of the creature was disguised by the thick layer of snow.

Perry, the other side of Baba’s bulging backpack, turned his head slowly towards the valley. There, just back the way they had come, a lurching figure scampered toward him. He had no energy to stand, and even then he wouldn’t have the pace to outrun the beast. He had no mana, his last reserves gone during a lapse of consciousness in the snow.

He could have called out. But, he knew that Baba would spring into action if he did. She’d try and get them both out alive, and die in the process.

Perry took a small pouch of sand from his pocket and tossed it over Baba’s backpack, landing next to her almost-frozen hand. This way, he thought to himself, she’d know there’s no-one left to save.

Perry sighed and watched the snowflakes wisp through the air in a gentle helix. After a moment he closed his eyes, and listened to the pounding footfalls…

It must be a caravan from Harmattan, he thought. No other region had stags like theirs, with such a heavy gallop.

It must be on the way around the mountain to Cierzo, he thought. Unless it was bound for the monks of the mountain itself, a rare visit for those lonely souls.

It must be carrying food and perishables, he thought. The speed and intensity of the stride makes it seem like they must be in a hurry.

There was a crunch of bone and ripping of sinew as the beast’s maw shut around him, the Wendigo’s rigid teeth arcing from his waist to his neck. Half the carcass was flung across the path, spattering the snow with blood and a trail of innards. A shill shriek erupted into the valley once more as the Wendigo began to feast, joyfully skittering from piece to piece, hail flying violently in a circle about it.

Baba watched from a treeline, just 100 feet from the path. In one hand she clutched the power core; in the other a pouch of sand.

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