The snow fell like forgotten memories—soft, endless, uninvited.
Each flake pirouetted down from a bruised sky, uncertain, as if questioning its right to exist before embracing the silence below. They touched the earth like fading thoughts—here, then gone. The forest loomed around them, ancient and unmoving, as though the trees themselves were holding their breath, unwilling to disturb what should not be.
And in that pause between heartbeats, he stood.
A boy. No taller than a whisper, no older than a single-digit candle on a half-forgotten cake. Seven years old. Not a day more. Not a day less. He stood not like a child, but like a truth—small, immovable, inevitable.
His hair was jet black, not merely dark but the kind of black that devours stars, that dreams of dying suns. The kind of black that remembers before light was born. And his eyes—red, foggy, surreal—were the last thing you'd see in a fever dream before waking up choking on silence. They glowed not with life, but with aftermath. He was a child shaped like a secret, carved from quiet, tempered in grief.
He did not shiver.
He did not blink.
He simply was, like a punctuation mark at the end of the universe.
Ahead of him: a cabin. Small. Crooked. Leaning into the snow as though begging it for mercy. Its roof sagged beneath the weight of time and winter. Its walls cracked like tired bones. This was not shelter—it was memory, fossilized. Waiting.
But behind it—
Behind it stood the impossible.
A silhouette against the white, so wrong it warped the world around it like heat over a corpse. A thing not meant to exist. A scar on reality.
It was not a monster.
It was an idea gone feral.
It towered—a living desecration, a sacrament of horror made flesh. Its form flickered at the edges, never quite settling on shape, as if the world itself rejected it, as if physics had disowned it. It was humanoid only in insult—its posture suggested a parody of man, but its essence was something ancient and starless. Tendrils burst from its body—some thick as oaks, some delicate as spider silk—all writhing, tasting the air for nightmares.
They didn't search for prey.
They searched for purpose.
Its flesh, if you could call it that, gleamed with the slick sheen of oiled obsidian—reflecting not light, but twisted echoes of what shouldn't be. Crimson veins pulsed just beneath the surface, threading through its mass like fault lines in the world's sanity. They beat with an intelligence colder than hate. Not rage. Design.
This was not a creature born of fury.
It was crafted by comprehension, a calculus of dread.
And its face—dear God, its face—
It was the cruel meeting of bone and intent. Elongated, sharp, the skull of something that had studied death and improved upon it. Teeth jutted like broken promises—jagged, mismatched, too many for a single mouth. But that mouth didn't open. It split, wide and wrong, vertically and horizontally like the world tearing in two. Inside: light, not of fire, but of something more final. Not heat—revelation.
A red so brilliant it burned meaning itself.
Its eyes weren't eyes. They were sigils, symbols from a language that predates sound—runes of madness etched in starlight. They didn't see you. They understood you. They reached into you like fingers into a wound and read you.
And on its shoulder, like a dream riding a nightmare, sat another boy.
Seven years old.
Blond hair like strands of sunlight stolen from summer's last breath. Golden eyes that shimmered like they'd seen too much and forgiven all of it. He wore a cloak the color of twilight, and at his waist, a sword—sheathed, but heavy with history. He didn't look afraid. He looked... tired. Relieved. Hollowed out and rebuilt from something gentler.
He looked at the black-haired boy the way a sunset looks at the sea—like it's seen it a thousand times, and still it aches to say goodbye.
And the boy below—he looked back.
Expressionless. Eternal. No recognition. No resistance. Just the stillness of a soul too old for its skin. His boots crunched the snow with the quiet resolve of inevitability. He turned his back on the impossible, the incomprehensible, the divine, the damned.
And he walked to the cabin.
He opened the door with the reverence of a priest.
And stepped inside without a glance back.
As if the gods weren't watching.
As if the universe hadn't sent a monster to bear witness.
As if he had already outlived the tradegy—and found it wanting.