Snow-Walker

One

Darkness drowns everything

and under its shadow-cover shapes … glide

dark beneath the clouds.

The creature moved down from the north, traveling quickly. All the long night it had blurred and flickered through blizzards, leaving its prints briefly on the open tundra, until the snow clogged them. It was a gray wraith on the glaciers, a shadow that trudged under black, frosted skies.

Hunger drove it—aching hunger. And a voice, a clear, cold voice that had called it out of some unremembered darkness, had knotted and woven its atoms together with spells and words and runes, and had sent it south tormented by this emptiness nothing could fill. Who the voice was, it did not know. It hardly knew anything, even where it was going.

The creature made a low moan that rang through the ice chasm around it. Sharp edges of snow fell soundlessly through its body. It climbed up and paused, turning its head north wearily, but the voice was still there, silent, insistent. It turned and trudged down the fellside.

There had been a feathered thing on a frozen lake days ago, but that had been stinking and tasteless, a picked skeleton. Silver shapes under the ice had flicked away, unreachable. Head down, the rune beast stumbled on without thought. Stars glinted through it.

Then it stopped and lifted its head.

Dark shapes crowded the hillside below. The creature had seen nothing like them before. They stood, huge and rigid, sighing in the raw wind. The voice put a word, like a cold drop, into the creature’s ear.

Trees.

Dimly it realized that the air had been changing for a long time. Days ago there had been bitter roaring winds at the uttermost ends of the earth, high snows and glacial emptiness. Now it was less cold. Down here things grew.

The rune creature glimmered between the trees and paused, deep in shadow. The wood was silent. There were strange new smells, teasing pleasures that tore at its hunger; pine and rotting wood and leaves and fungi; rich, decaying sensations. And beyond that, small, musky scents.

Animals.

The voice told it about animals, the sweetness of meat, the warmth of blood.

It hurried on, eager, drifting and glinting through the tangled undergrowth. Snow fell through its body silently.