A false serenity hung over an alpine forest, draped in snow both old and fresh. Somewhere in the transition zone between thinning woods and rocky slopes where trees knew better than to grow, a man draped in matted furs stalked about, crouching low to the ground, browsing for anything useful. He kept pulling the hood of his crudely fashioned cloak forward, shielding his eyes as if trying to remain unidentified even in this desolate place. Brooding under the surface of that false serenity was the quiet intensity of midwinter, a time for the most desperate, beast and human alike, to become the endangered as they competed for the scarcest resources in the harshest conditions.
The frigid air gnawed at the man’s face and extremities. He sighed as he knelt before yet another batch of white-blanketed bushes, shoving snow and crystalline ice off as he browsed for something edible. Might they yield berries held in statis by the frost? Or could the skinny carcass of some beast, its hibernation cut short, be hiding beneath them? Any sustenance, no matter how meager, would suffice.
Just as his hands were starting to tingle with numbness, they brushed against something with multiple long, rough, and gnarly protrusions. Finger-like. Suddenly, he broke the quiet of the wilderness with a backwards-bounding leap and great yelp.
“Save me, oh… oh, bloody rout.” The man’s tone has shifted rapidly from aghast to aggravated. Stomping back over to the half-exposed bush, he struck it several times as he scolded himself. “Aulfvad, it’s a damned branch! Can’t jump at every little thing, now.”
He shoved aside the offending object, a long tree branch that must have fallen and intermixed with the bushes sometime before the snow had arrived. As he pushed the branch away it flailed upward, resembling a shriveled arm waving in the air, grotesque and comical at once. Aulfvad huffed and then forged onward. His surroundings started growing quieter as he trekked onward, but he hadn’t noticed this as he was drifting back into his own thoughts.
He started longing for his former life, far from extravagant yet full of simple abundance. For one thing, there were more people to talk to: A troupe two dozen strong, kin and friends alike, pulling covered wagons and leading sheep and goats in search of pastures where their herds could graze. These days, only three companions awaited him, acquaintances squatting in a cramped but well-hidden crevice up in the slopes. He missed feeling full, too, recalling how he would snack on plentiful homemade cheese or dried fruit as he took his shift watching the herds. Now he was reduced to scavenging in woodlands forsaken by all but the most desperate of people.
There was nothing for it, though. The life he’d known had been taken away from him forcefully for reasons he could not grasp, all just half a year ago. He had no prospects for managing a herd or taking up some other profession while he was being hunted. Mere survival was the best he could manage.
The offending branch from earlier crossed his mind again. Woody and bare, unlike the surrounding pines, its bark made him recall ancient, desiccated skin. It had the wrong number of “fingers” for a human hand---but not the wrong number of fingers for his uncanny hunters, the ones that had driven him out here.
Even when the conditions of his surroundings made his skin go numb, recalling encounters with his hunters could make him feel fresh pinpricks of cold. In his few clear, non-terror-ridden memories of them, he saw elongated, spindly arms protruding from abnormally long robes. Worse were their faces, which Aulfvad could still remember from the first encounter, back when he dared to look upon them directly. The hoods of their robes framed leathery, wrinkled, angular features, half veiled in shadows that were interrupted by two white spots. He was reminded less of eyes as he knew them and more of a distant yet bright source of light glowing through holes cut into fabric. Those strange faces and otherworldly eyes were what intruded upon his dreams and roused him awake most nights.
In his gnawing dread, he tried to tell himself how he ought to have been safer out here in the dead of winter. Though he knew not whether beings so unnatural as his hunters could succumb to the cold, the weather should at least complicate travel for the hunters much as they did for the hunted. Better yet, the short days extended the cover of night, furnishing his single best shelter against prying eyes.
But these thoughts gave him little consolation. If he survived the winter, he realized, the spring would leave him more exposed. And after that? More foraging on the run? How long was all this to go on for? Would the hunters ever stop hunting?
Aulfvad scanned the forest around him, trying to excise these thoughts from his mind. But all the tree trunks were tall and thin with a dry and withered countenance. Their knots loosely resembled gaunt faces amid the thicket of trees. Some of the knots were filled with snow, a little too reminiscent of those terrible eye-spots. Worse still was when the breeze kicked up and caused the trees to sway, simulacra of gangly figures stalking through the woods, their gazes fixed in an unknowable direction.
These superficial resemblances only fueled Aulfvad’s paranoia. Aulfvad was beginning to sweat, heat and cold now playing against his skin. Months spent eking out an existence in the shadow of mortal danger were wearing down his mind. He refocused his gaze to the forest floor, diverting his eyes from the trees as he ambled forward.
Perhaps an hour later, he happened upon clear evidence of disturbed ground. Some shrubs, too, wore long streaks across their blankets of snow. Something had brushed past them. But the tracks didn’t exhibit clear footprints. Rather, it appeared that whatever left these marks had been dragging something behind it. Aulfvad knew of deer and bears living in these parts, but they were surely sheltered away and in deep slumber. Perhaps another person who’d caught some game? Or, if not that, then…
Aulfvad’s whole body tensed up as he made his calculations and deductions. He was just about ready to flee on the spot when an angry resolve overtook his fear. Why am I always running? He thought to himself. How can I keep darting off like a frightened animal every time something spooks me? Dammit, I’ll follow these tracks. Whatever they lead to, I’m better off knowing about it anyway. He hesitated for a few more seconds, the hair bristling on his arms, but then he took one resolute step forward, and then another. He started following the trail.
***
The trail led Aulfvad uphill to thinning woods until he approached the tree line, beyond which the bare alpine slopes offered little shelter from the wind. The ground became steeper here, such that he traversed some of it in a half-climb, nearly numb hands ready to slip at any moment. Still, curiosity drove him onward, and grooves in the previous day’s snow betrayed the path his mark had taken.
He carried on in this manner for at least another hour. After rounding a sheer cliff face which rose like a wall at his side, he was surprised to find a camp enter his vision almost immediately, not particularly well hidden. Two tents plus a fallen log—hauled all this way up the slopes?—which served as a bench of sorts.
On the improvised bench sat a hulking figure, facing away from Aulfvad. Curiously, it—a man?—remained still, apparently not detecting Aulfvad’s presence. The figure was barrel-chested and broad-shouldered, and Aulfvad would’ve guessed they were at least six feet tall. He stifled a sigh of relief. Whoever they were, their profile didn’t resemble the awful beings who haunted his nightmares. If anything, he found it reassuring to discover a powerful-looking fellow human here. He decided to make his approach, forgetting his instincts—surely strange people, too, should be deemed dangerous in the remote wilderness. The matter of the second tent and whether it housed another occupant didn’t cross his mind, either.
“Hail,” Aulfvad beckoned. He was unsure what to say next, suddenly reminded of how little he had conversed with anyone in the last half-year. Even back at his camp, there was rarely much to discuss with his traveling companions, and a difficult winter had put them all in a grim mood.
He worked up the nerve to attempt an awkward query. “What brings you…”
“Ah, it is courteous of you to offer greetings, at least. Otherwise, you could make one apprehensive, even more so once you reach for that axe at your side.”
The stranger, their back still turned to Aulfvad, was noticeably more articulate than him. They spoke with no accent that caught his attention—overly formal, if anything. Aulfvad was so struck by the ease of the stranger’s tone that several seconds passed before he realized that he was indeed reaching for his woodsman’s axe, a dark blade of pockmarked, low-quality iron. His heart was racing, though he saw no reason for this.
“I—I meant no offense, please,” Aulfvad stammered. Trying for a gesture of courtesy, he drew back his hood, revealing a pale, narrow face, heavily bearded and crowned by matted, chestnut-brown hair with a few curls springing from the sides of his head. Visible, too, was the collar of his dirty linen tunic—clearly better suited for the summer—and frayed leather ties which no longer laced it up completely. He grew self-conscious, realizing how ragged he must’ve looked. “Can’t say I was expecting company in these parts. What brings you all this way?"
The stranger remained silent for a few seconds, as if Aulfvad had posed a challenging question and not what was essentially small talk. “What might bring anyone to this wild and remote place? I am a hunter, of course.”
“O-of course…” Aulfvad tried to keep his composure, but doubt was brooding in his mind now. There was little game to be found so late in the season; a hunter with sufficient means would’ve been better off anywhere else. He hesitated to probe further but carried on anyway. “Slim pickings out here, don’t you think? What sort of hunting—er, furs? Horn? Or are you out here for sport?”
The stranger let out an amused huff as they straightened their back slightly. Another ponderous response to another innocuous question. “I suppose my purpose out here depends on who one asks. I am inclined to think of this as hunting for sport, yes.”
Aulfvad went quiet, reaching for his next words with about as much success as he’d foraged for berries earlier that day. He glanced around the camp, identifying no obvious signs of caught trophies, only a mass of several lumps concealed by a soiled tarp near the edge of a camp. The mass could’ve been the size of a fawn or a young wolf, but the shape was beyond recognition. He noticed dried blood on the tarp and the ground around it. Admittedly, that was to be expected for the remains of a successful catch.
Still, Aulfvad started sweating again. After an extended silence, he resolved to pose another question. “Might I ask who you are? It seems only fair if—”
Aulfvad’s voice caught in his throat as the figure turned to face him. A leathery, yellow-beige hand, somehow gaunt and muscular at once, rested on the log. Then a face peaked out from beneath the hood of a dark cloak. That face scanned Aulfvad studiously and without betraying any strong emotion. Where there should have been eyes, there were instead eye sockets flooded with a white fog, evanescent yet substantial, misty yet impenetrable. Despite the false eyes’ lack of pupils or any other distinct features, Aulfvad knew instinctively that they were unflinchingly fixed upon him.
Aulfvad felt a sense of betrayal as he looked upon the hooded visage. He was familiar with campfire tales of doppelgangers and body-snatchers, but never had he imagined he would see one of those ghastly faces atop a frame which looked human from afar. Aulfvad’s lips quivered as something inarticulate escaped them, and he fumbled for his axe. A part of him was silently cursing himself for having ruined his hunting bow last during that clumsy river crossing last autumn.
The stranger rose suddenly, outstretching one unnatural hand—three long, knotty fingers and a muscular thumb—and began speaking. Aulfvad found their speech incomprehensible, a series of sibilant hisses punctuated with guttural noises in a harsh tenor. He could barely parse out any vowels.
The stranger then clenched their hand with almost imperceptible subtlety, and Aulfvad began to feel dizzy. He took a lunging step regardless, hoping to move in for a quick attack, but in doing so became nauseous, his view of the world around him wavering. Aulfvad sucked in air between gritted teeth, feebly attempting to steel himself for the now-hostile encounter.
While Aulfvad staggered about, the stranger turned their head slightly, uttering something else still wholly foreign to him. Aulfvad suddenly thought it better to throw his axe at his foe and flee. He refocused his vision as best he could and raised his arm, aiming for the figure’s head. But in that moment, something slinked out from a tent in the back of the camp and entered Aulfvad’s vision. Aulfvad let his axe slip from his hand as abject terror overtook him.
The new arrival was a slender being of vaguely human shape, nearly seven feet tall, unnaturally graceful. Unlike the hulking figure, this one was grinning menacingly and speaking in soft, pleased tones. But the face, although thinner, was essentially the same. Horrific memories flashed through Aulfvad’s mind, as if on cue, of alien figures with bright eye-spots standing over the wreckage of burning wagons and the broken bodies of his family and other fellow herders. Recalling these traumas in grisly detail, Aulfvad no longer knew whether to attribute his nausea to these memories or the spell that had been cast over him. As he refocused on his present surroundings, he saw that the slender being’s grin had only grown wider, resembling that of a bare skull. This being truly was the stuff of Aulfvad’s nightmares. Might it have been one of the original hunters who had upended Aulfvad’s life months ago?
He had only a few moments to reflect. The slender being commenced its own speech, a serpentine lullaby, accompanied by fidgety yet delicate twitchings of its upraised hands. Over a length of time immeasurable yet brief, Aulfvad’s vision grew dark around the edges until all that was visible was that macabre alien visage. His mouth gaped, releasing a silent scream as he felt the remainder of his vision and his very self fade into oblivion.
