Time passed as the last daylight began to set, and the temperature outside began to improve—from a killing -150°F to a bone-chilling -50°F.
The howling wind softened slightly, but it still rattled against the ice-slick rocks outside the cave, like claws dragging against frozen glass.
"I'm going out," Monica spoke quietly, stepping away from the warmth of the bonfire, her breath forming puffs of steam in the air.
Several heads lifted from their bundled huddles. The firelight flickered across their worn faces, some still marked with frostbite and soot.
"What?" her mother said, startled. "Moni—"
"I'll be back before the dark-night begins," she said, voice steady as steel. "I found an old axe. I've strengthened it."
"I can cut enough wood to push the bonfire through another night."
Her mother's brows furrowed. She stepped forward slightly, her fingers clenching the edge of her shawl. "Even with that axe… You won't last long out there. The wind alone can freeze your lungs."
"I can last," Monica said with finality. She wasn't trying to sound brave. She had to last. There wasn't another choice.
A few others stirred—some making weak attempts to rise, to protest or to offer help—but they faltered almost immediately.
Their limbs trembled. Eyes sunken. They had nothing left to give.
Monica met each gaze with a calm steadiness.
"We'll keep the fire going," her mother finally said, softly. "Just… come back. Before it's too late."
Monica gave a sharp nod and adjusted the satchel over her shoulder. Empty, for now. It would return full—or she wouldn't return at all.
She slung the newly-upgraded axe across her back.
The binding cord clicked into place with a snug fit, the blade resting neatly over the leather sheath she'd strapped together from scraps.
Then she pulled a three-meter-long stick from the camp wall—a crude ice probe and walking pole in one, something she'd seen her father use when navigating the brittle ground outside.
She approached the cave mouth.
The entrance was little more than a jagged crack between frozen stone slabs, concealed by a makeshift curtain of stitched furs and ice-chipped wood.
Monica paused, took one last look at the fire and the people circled around it… at her mother's pale, anxious face.
"Mom. I'll definitely come back before dark-night," she said again, her voice low and serious. "Once I'm gone, seal the entrance immediately."
"If anyone comes… and they can't match the code… no matter who they are, don't open up. Don't even speak."
Her mother looked torn, but nodded solemnly.
This wasn't the first time they had to follow this rule—but it had never been Monica walking out alone before.
Without another word, Monica gripped the fur-flap, tore it aside, and crawled out into the blackened world.
Her mother sealed the entrance behind her, pressing frozen earth and stone tight, stuffing every gap with wool and frost-soaked cloth.
As the last sliver of light vanished, her heart thudded painfully. She whispered a prayer to the bonfire god—an old habit none of them questioned anymore.
Outside, the wind screamed.
Sky Wood Ridge, no one really knew how big it was.
Not Monica. Not even her father, Edward, or his father—who'd spent years mapping and exploring the terrain around their small camp.
And certainly not any of the nine other known human camps that dotted the Ridge's outskirts.
Their own settlement was called Red Stone camp, named by her great-grandfather after the red stone caves, they were hiding.
Just "the cave"—a temporary refuge that had somehow become permanent over the years.
Despite more than a decade of scavenging and hunting, the furthest any of their people had gone was about twenty kilometers in radius.
Their exploration had been mostly confined to the east-facing slope of Sky Wood Ridge, staying close to the few other caves scattered around their known territory.
That was it. Twenty kilometers.
And even that had nearly cost them everything, more than once.
The western boundary of that range—the outer edge of Sky Wood Ridge itself—was a different story.
A place choked with trees. Endless trees, reaching the sky, giving them the name Sky Wood.
Unlike the gnarled, frostbitten stumps near their camp, the Ridge's trees grew thick, wild, and unreasonably tall.
It shouldn't have been like that. With nine camps scattered around the forest, with constant harvesting of lumber, one would think the Ridge should've started to thin out over the years.
But it hadn't.
If anything—it had grown.
It kept growing.
Edward and others had measured it before. A tree marked and logged one year would somehow be surrounded by two more the next.
Not saplings either—full-grown, bark-thick, snow-heavy trees. The deeper into the Ridge one ventured, the bigger and older the trees seemed to be.
A never-ending forest of biting shadows and creaking giants.
The camp didn't talk about it much—but everyone knew something was wrong.
Worse, the Ridge didn't just feed the humans trying to survive on its edges.
It mostly fed the cold beasts.
Most of the cold beasts lived in the trees.
Not just beneath them, or between their trunks—in them.
Nestled high in thick, ice-bound hollows, clinging to the upper branches. Some nested inside cracked tree cores, gnawing at frozen pulp, hibernating during light nights, and hunting during the dark nights until the next light night.
Worse still, they didn't just kill to eat.
Cold beasts had a particular fondness for the Ridge's winter fruits—hard, bitter things that grew in tufts along the upper branches, glowing faintly like blue embers in the dark.
Eating them seems to make these cold beasts mature faster from younger bodies to adulthood, same as it does in humans.
To cold beasts, those fruits were a delicacy. A lure. A reason to stay close to the trees and defend them.
Therefore, the expansion of Sky Wood Ridge wasn't just strange.
It was fatal.
Every meter the trees stretched outward was another meter of cold beast territory.
Their domain crept closer and closer to the human camps—inch by inch, root by root—making hunting paths narrower, scavenging routes more dangerous, and escape harder by the season.
Some camps had already fallen. One by one, they went dark—smoke trails gone, their fire altars left to freeze over.
Of course, these weren't things Monica needed to worry about now.
Right now, she needed wood and food.
To survive.