As the sky turned from pale gray to a bruised deep shade of indigo, the temperature plummeted instantly. The wind whipped through Elowyn’s thin clothes like knives, but she forced her body forward, sinking knee-deep into the snow.
Fear squeezed her throat tight, but she refused to look back at the horizon. She had lost track of time, and her numb legs moved on sheer instincts alone.
Having spent her life inside the IronFang tribe, the sheer vastness of the wilderness was overwhelming. There were no paths, no fires, and no familiar voices. There was only the endless suffocating silence of a frozen expanse she knew nothing about.
No wonder Nysa threw her out.
Elowyn was no warrior. She had no grand reputation. But as a shiftless runt living amongst beastpeople, she had spent her entire life finding ways to improvise and adapt,just to stay alive. Despite her lack of beast traits, that resourcefulness had helped her within the tribe, even if the people within it treated her like trash without giving her a chance.
But being out here, she realized she was completely out of her depth, and the wild knew it. Forget about finding a mate, she might not even make it to dawn.
Shivering until her bones ached, Elowyn wrapped her arms around herself and watched the sun bleed away behind the mountain ridge.
Night was coming.
Panicked, she slowed her pace, her eyes scanning the tree line in a frenzy. The towering pine trees closed in all around her, casting long, twisted shadows that pooled across the snow like black ink.
She stared into the abyss beneath a hollowed-out trunk, and a pair of pale eyes blinked out of the gloom. Then another. Then a cluster of glinting, beady eyes were staring right back at her, reflecting the dying twilight.
Whether it was hallucination brought on by exhaustion or a pack of hungry predators, the horrific sight shattered her resolve.
Nope!
Elowyn shrieked, the sound swallowed by the gale, and she bolted toward the opposite direction.
The forest transformed into a gauntlet of terror. Gnarly, snow-draped branches reached out like skeletal hands, snagging at her clothes and clawing at her skin.
The roots hidden beneath the drifts trapped her, sending her stumbling and scrambling through the slush. To her hyperventilating mind, every whip of the wind sounded like a monster breathing down her neck, though she refused to look back and confirm it.
Where was she even going?!
How was she ever going to survive the night?!
She was fleeing blindly through a frozen nightmare with no map, no light, and no idea what safe shelter even looked like in these woods. Her lungs screamed for oxygen, her mouth so dry it felt coated in dust. Gasping, she snatched a lump of fresh snow from a passing bough, jamming it past her cracked lips.The arctic cold shocked her mouth, but she swallowed the freezing slush down, desperate for anything to sustain her.
If she collapsed out here, she would undoubtedly freeze to death before midnight. Or worse, what if she stumbled into the jaws of whatever stalked the dark?
No.
Not like this.
She kept running.
"There has to be something," Elowyn choked out, her voice breaking against the howling wind as she pushed her breaking body forward. "Just... a cave, a hollow, anything... please!"
Like an answer to her desperate prayer, a shadowed rift along the cliffside flashed past her vision. She skidded through the slush, fighting the wind that threatened to sweep her off her feet, and scrambled backwards toward the cliff face.
Ahah!
There, tucked into the jagged face of the cliff, was a small overhang. It looked like the remnants of a rockslide, creating a natural stone alcove that looked barely deep enough to house her frame, but if she squeezed through, she believed she would be able to make it inside just fine.
Her aching muscles screamed to just throw herself into the darkness, but Elowyn forced herself to halt at the threshold, knowing that would be a dangerous gamble.
What if it already housed something else?
She couldn’t take any chances.
Lowering herself onto her knees, she meticulously scrutinized the fresh snow framing the entrance. She tilted her head, sniffing the frigid air, but there was no heavy musk scent of an apex beast lingering around it. Just to be certain, she crept closer, running her eyes over the jagged rocks to check for stray furs or claw marks, but she found nothing.
Satisfied she wouldn’t be sharing the space with a hungry carnivore, she ducked low and wriggled into the narrow space.
The large stone roof offered immediate relief from the screaming wind, but the ground beneath her was a silent executioner. The stone was a thief. It soaked up body heat like a sponge, leeching warmth from flesh until the blood ran cold. It was a brutal lesson she had learned back when she built her tiny hut in the IronFang village.
"This won’t keep me alive," she uttered to herself, looking back out at the fast-approaching night. "And it’s already getting dark. It’s too late to find another hideout now. I’ll just have to insulate this ground, or I freeze before dawn."
As the last traces of daylight slowly bled into pitch black, Elowyn forced her numb body into action. Her limbs felt heavy as lead, yet her hands moved with the frantic, practiced efficiency of a survivor.
She darted into the screaming gale, her bare hands digging through the icy top crust to snatch armfuls of dry pine needles and brittle leaves buried beneath. Shielding her harvest against her chest, she scrambled back into the alcove, spreading the thick, dense layer across the floor.
Her head spun from raw hunger, but she pushed herself back out into the night again and again. She hauled back load after load until she had built a thick, insulated mattress to shield her body from the stone.
Gently patting it down, she shifted her gaze to the wide, vulnerable opening.
She needed a barrier.
Fighting through suffocating exhaustion, Elowyn dragged heavy, fallen pine boughs across the narrow mouth of the cave. Studying the heavy needle branches, she wedged and interlocked them with desperate strength, weaving a crude, tight barricade to bar predators out and seal out the frost.
When the makeshift door wedged tight against the rock, the howling blizzard outside dropped instantly to a low, muted thrum.
Pitch blackness swallowed the alcove whole.
The moment her brain registered safety, Elowyn’s body completely gave out. The adrenaline that had driven her through the blizzard evaporated, leaving her hollow and broken. Elowyn collapsed into her nest of pine needles, her limbs buckling like wet parchment.
Curling into a tight ball, she dragged her knees to her chest, her jaw clicking uncontrollably as she blew faint, warm breath over her raw, scraped palms.
Setting a fire in this cramped pocket was out of the question; the smoke would suffocate her before morning.
She was alone in the pitch black, with nothing but her own fragile heat to keep her alive.
In the absolute quiet of her stone tomb, the heavy weight of her reality rushed in to fill the silence. It started as a dull ache in her chest that spread until every bruised muscle and scraped bone screamed, her stomach cramping with hunger.
Her mind, no longer hyper-focused on survival, turned inward.
She did not do anything wrong.
All her life, the IronFang tribe had taught her that the world was naturally cruel to shiftless-creatures like her, that people like her were meant to suffer, to serve, to endure the insults because that was simply the price a runt paid to exist. She had accepted all their maltreatment because she believed that was the price she needed to pay if she wanted to belong in the tribe, despite her obvious lackings.
But she hadn’t done anything wrong.
She hadn’t lusted after Kaelen. She hadn’t betrayed Nysa at all. She had only ever offered loyalty, gratitude and quiet endurance. She had wronged no one. She just wanted to be accepted by her tribe.
Tears finally spilled past her eyelashes, hot against her frozen cheeks. Why was her devotion rewarded with exile? Why did her existence invite so much malice?
There was no answer.
Only the low, distant hum of the storm outside.
Her eyelids soon grew impossibly heavy, the darkness pressing against her chest as her heart slowed to a weary crawl. Her mind drifted, untethered by hunger and the physical depletion of her body.
Before the second wave of tears could fall, her battered body simply shut down, pulling her beneath the surface into sweet, merciful unconsciousness.