Snow fell steadily through the night, burying the broken city under a white silence. It was a fragile beauty, draping the scars of war in a false peace. Beneath the hush, life crawled on — soldiers and villagers alike, moving like ghosts through half-shattered streets.
In the marsh beyond, the fog never lifted. It roiled and shifted, as if alive, and carried strange echoes to the city walls. Sometimes it sounded like a child crying. Sometimes like the last gasp of a dying beast.
And then, once, just before dawn — it laughed.
Aldric barely slept. Messages came day and night from his scouts, each more disturbing than the last.
"My lord," Kaelin said, slamming a parchment down on the war table, "they found six men strung from the willows by their own guts. Faces twisted like they'd seen the pit of the gods themselves."
Aldric clenched his fists. "Was it one of ours?"
"No," Kaelin replied. "Marsh bandits. But still… something's playing with its food."
The king's stomach turned. He looked out the frost-blurred window toward the marsh. What stirs you, old monster? What drives you to toy with mortals now?
Maerlyn stood beside him, silent. Her eyes were red-rimmed, hair unbound, symbols of warding traced in soot across her brow.
"I tried again last night," she said, voice cracking. "Tried to pierce its mind. But the wards burned in my hands. It is… it is awake, Aldric. Fully awake."
He swallowed hard. "Is it the Widow reborn?"
"No," Maerlyn whispered. "This is older. Hungrier."
The city worked without pause. Hammers rang against stone, menders stitched torn banners, stable hands tended horses whose coats steamed in the cold. Everyone moved faster now, gripped by a quiet panic.
Rowena took it upon herself to comfort the children, gathering them in the half-ruined cathedral. She told them old legends — stories of foxes who outwitted wolves, of clever crows who stole fire from the sun.
They listened with wide eyes, clutching one another.
"Monsters can be beaten," she told them, her voice steady though her heart trembled. "Remember that. Monsters can always be beaten."
On the walls, Kaelin drilled new recruits. Their breath smoked in the freezing air as they trained until their muscles burned, until the pain became a kind of prayer.
"Faster!" she barked. "If you hesitate, you die!"
She corrected a boy's spear stance, then turned to a young woman who could barely lift her shield.
"Feel the weight," Kaelin told her. "Make it an extension of your arm. Don't fear it — own it."
The woman nodded, jaw tight with determination.
As evening fell, Maerlyn gathered her circle of hedge mages and dream-seers again. They descended into the crypt below the cathedral, its stones still warm from the Widow's corruption.
Candles guttered as they laid out maps, bones, carved tokens.
"Listen," Maerlyn commanded. "Tell me what you hear."
The oldest witch — skin as cracked as riverbed clay — closed her eyes. "It is waiting," she rasped. "It was called by the Widow's agony. But it is not her servant. It comes because it hungers."
"Hungers for what?" asked a young mage.
The old woman's eyes opened, yellow and terrible. "For us. For our dreams. Our stories. Our fears. It feasts on what makes us human."
A chill swept through them.
Maerlyn's jaw tightened. "Then we must give it nothing."
They burned charms of rowan and iron along the ramparts, praying it would keep the thing at bay. But the marsh winds only seemed to mock them, whispering curses in a language no one had heard for a thousand years.
That night, the guards saw something move in the fog — a shape with too many limbs, sliding between the twisted trees. Its eyes glowed pale, like drowned lanterns, then vanished again.
The bravest among them shot arrows into the darkness, but there was nothing to hit, only water rippling.
In Aldric's private chambers, a bitter cold coiled around his heart. His hands shook as he poured a cup of watered wine.
Kaelin came in, silent as a ghost.
"You need sleep," she told him again.
He smiled weakly. "If I close my eyes, I see them. All of them. The ones I failed."
Kaelin put a steady hand on his shoulder. "You did not fail them, Aldric. You stood. You stood. That is more than any man can be asked to do."
He covered her hand with his own, grateful for the warmth.
"Tell me true," he asked softly. "Can we hold, Kaelin? If it comes?"
Her eyes were hard as iron. "We will hold. Even if the gods themselves break, we will hold."
Beyond the marsh, the creature began to dream.
It dreamed of walls broken. Of screams. Of blood so bright it painted the sky.
It had been so long since it had feasted. So long since it had felt the rush of terror through its black veins.
Now it could almost taste it again — the flavor of Frostfang's hope.
It dreamed, and somewhere in that dreaming, the fog thickened, pressing closer to the city, carrying the reek of rot and grave earth.
A week passed. Then another.
No attack came, but the sense of doom grew. Animals fled the marsh, rabbits and foxes and birds, running in frantic lines for safer ground. Frostfang's healers found men waking from nightmares so terrible they clawed their own faces.
Rowena tended them, whispering prayers, binding their torn hands, but even her gentle voice seemed powerless against such horror.
One night, she walked the courtyard alone, lantern swinging at her side, and felt something watching her from the dark. She turned — but there was only snow, softly falling.
Still, the hair on her neck stood straight, and she hurried back to the safety of the chapel.
Maerlyn's dreams grew stranger, full of visions of a beast with a thousand eyes, its mouth wide enough to swallow cities whole. When she woke, she could barely breathe.
Aldric found her by the fire, hunched and trembling.
"Maerlyn," he asked gently, "what did you see?"
"It has no name," she whispered. "It was old when this world was young. It remembers every drop of blood ever spilled in hate. It thrives on it."
He swallowed hard. "How do we kill it?"
She met his gaze, hopeless and afraid.
"I do not know."
At the edge of the marsh, villagers saw the ground bubble, as if something huge swam just under the surface. Their screams carried on the wind all the way to the city gates.
Kaelin dispatched scouts, but none returned.
Finally, she told Aldric, "We cannot wait for it to choose its time."
He nodded grimly. "We take the fight to it?"
"Yes," she said. "Before it grows any stronger."
Maerlyn stepped forward, voice shaking. "If you go to it, you will see your worst nightmares made flesh. It will break your mind."
Aldric straightened. "Then we go together. And if it breaks us, we break it back."
That night, they prepared for war once more.
Kaelin donned blackened steel, Rowena readied charms of faith and hope, and Maerlyn gathered the last relics of forgotten gods.
The soldiers of Frostfang, beaten but unbowed, formed up in grim silence.
They would march at dawn.
And beyond the marsh, the ancient horror waited, its hunger sharp, its eyes bright, dreaming of the end of all things.