Silence woke him before dawn.
Not quiet—*absence*. The kind of hollow that pressed against eardrums like deep water, where even heartbeats sounded too loud. Kaelen lay still in his bed, listening to nothing where roosters should have crowed, where dogs should have barked the morning alive.
Through frost-etched glass, the world had vanished.
Fog rolled between houses like slow water, thick enough to walk on. It moved wrong—not drifting with wind but *flowing*, purposeful as a river seeking its course. The bell tower disappeared into gray nothing, and beyond it, the forest might as well have never existed.
Kaelen pressed his palm to the window. The glass didn't fog around his fingers this time—too cold, even for the heat that lived in his bones.
Downstairs, floorboards creaked. Gerun's voice carried sharp through the silence.
"Bell's not ringing."
His mother's humming stopped mid-note.
---
The rope hung slack in Gerun's fist.
Kaelen followed him up the narrow stairs to the bell tower, boots scraping against wood worn smooth by decades of climbers. The fog pressed close around them, muffling sound until their breathing echoed like wind in caves.
At the top, Gerun pulled hard on the bell rope. His shoulders bunched with effort, muscles straining against leather that should have sung with bronze.
Nothing.
He tried again, yanking until sweat beaded on his forehead despite the cold. The rope moved freely, but no sound came—not even the dull thud of clapper against metal.
"Can't be broken." Gerun reached up and grabbed the iron clapper with both hands.
It wouldn't budge. Not rusted—*frozen*. Ice crystals webbed across the bronze like silver veins, locking the mechanism in place from the inside out.
Gerun's hands came away bloody where the cold metal had bitten through his palms.
"That's not weather," he said, voice flat as winter stone.
Below them, the fog pressed closer against the tower's walls. And in its gray depths, shapes moved that didn't belong to wind or shadow.
---
The scream split morning like a blade through silk.
Kaelen was helping his mother crush dried herbs when the sound tore across the village—raw, desperate, wrong in ways that made his teeth ache. Not fear. Not pain.
*Rupture*.
Edira's mortar and pestle clattered to the floor, scattering crushed mint like green snow. The scream echoed off stone walls and wooden roofs until it seemed to come from everywhere at once.
Then—silence again.
Men's voices rose in the fog, calling to each other with the sharp urgency of pack hunters. Boots pounded against packed earth as they converged toward the sound's source, somewhere beyond the sheep pens where the south fields stretched toward nothing.
Kaelen moved toward the door, but his father's hand clamped on his shoulder.
"Inside. Now."
"But—"
"Now."
Vern's fingers dug deep enough to bruise, and in his eyes Kaelen saw something he'd never witnessed before. Not anger. Not even fear.
*Certainty*. The kind that came with knowing exactly how bad things were about to become.
"It's already here," Kaelen said quietly.
His father's grip tightened until bones creaked.
"I know."
---
Six men entered the Blighted Woods. Only Gerun had silver on his arrows.
Kaelen watched from the kitchen window as his brother led the hunters into fog that swallowed them whole. Elder Toneff, broad-shouldered from a lifetime of splitting wood. Jansek the tanner, leather-tough and quick with a skinning knife. Young Marek, barely sixteen but steady with a crossbow.
They moved single-file, weapons ready, voices dropping to whispers as the trees closed around them. Within twenty steps, the fog claimed them completely.
The village held its breath.
Edira resumed her humming—nervous, discordant notes that caught in her throat and died. She moved between kitchen and parlor like a caged animal, straightening things that didn't need straightening, dusting surfaces already clean.
Vern sat at the table with his head in his hands, the rusted pendant of Melitele turning slow circles between his fingers.
Time stretched like heated metal.
Then, carried on air too thick to breathe, came a voice.
"Help me..."
Thin. Childlike. Drifting from the woods like smoke from a distant fire.
"Please... someone help me..."
Kaelen's blood turned to ice water. That voice—he knew that voice. Had heard it calling from the Bonewell on nights when sleep wouldn't come.
*Not a child. Something wearing a child's voice like stolen clothes.*
The fog pressed closer against the windows, and in its gray depths, shadows moved that cast no reflection.
---
The first they saw of Gerun was his blood.
Dark drops in the snow, leading from the forest edge toward the village square. A trail of red breadcrumbs that spoke of wounds and worse things.
Then came the limping figure that cast it.
Gerun emerged from the fog like something crawling from a grave. Gore soaked his clothes from collar to boots—too much to be his own, wrong colors mixed with the red. His bow hung broken in his left hand, string snapped, wood cracked along the grain.
In his right hand, he carried an arm.
Severed clean at the shoulder, fingers still twitching with phantom life. The skin was too pale, the muscle too lean. It belonged to someone who'd been hungry for a long time.
Jansek's arm. Kaelen recognized the burn scar across the knuckles from a childhood accident with his father's forge.
The crowd that had gathered in the square backed away as Gerun approached, boots squelching through slush gone pink with runoff. His eyes stared straight ahead, focused on something only he could see.
"Where are the others?" Elder Marec stepped forward, voice steady despite the tremor in his hands.
Gerun stopped walking. The arm in his grip gave one final twitch, then went still.
"Ask the trees."
"Son—"
"It didn't walk like an animal." Gerun's voice came out flat, emptied of everything but truth. "Or a man. It moved like..." He paused, searching for words that didn't exist. "Like something trying to remember how bodies work."
Silence stretched between them. In the fog above, something circled on wings that made no sound.
"What did you see?" Marec pressed.
Gerun looked at him then, and in his eyes Kaelen saw the kind of damage that never healed.
"Too much."
---
By afternoon, every window in Veldermere had been boarded shut.
Kaelen watched his father nail planks across their kitchen glass, hammer blows echoing like distant thunder. The fog still pressed close outside, thick enough now to muffle even that sound.
His mother sat in the corner, humming the same broken lullaby over and over. Her fingers worked at something in her lap—thread, maybe, or dried herbs. Whatever it was, she twisted it into shapes that hurt to look at directly.
Gerun cleaned his weapons with mechanical precision. Arrow after arrow, each silver head polished until it gleamed like captured starlight. The broken bow lay beside him in pieces, wood dark with blood that wouldn't wash clean.
"How many?" Kaelen asked quietly.
His brother didn't look up from his work. "Four. Maybe five, depending on what you count as death."
"What does that mean?"
"Means some of them were still moving when they shouldn't have been."
Heat flared in Kaelen's chest—not warmth but *hunger*. Something in him responded to the violence, to the scent of fear that filled the house like incense. His hands trembled with the effort of keeping that fire leashed.
Outside, the fog had thickened to the consistency of wool. But through its gray mass, shapes pressed against the boarded windows. Testing. Searching for weakness.
For a moment, Kaelen saw it clearly—perched on the bell tower like some grotesque weathervane. Wings folded against a body that might once have been human. Head cocked at an angle that spoke of broken necks and worse things.
It wasn't hunting anymore.
It was *waiting*.
The fire in his chest pulsed once, recognizing something in that patient stillness. Kinship, maybe. Or just the shared understanding of predators who knew their prey had nowhere left to run.
Kaelen closed his eyes and felt heat spread through his veins like molten gold.
*Tonight. It comes tonight. And when it does...*
He thought of Jansek's arm, still twitching in his brother's grip. Of men who moved when they should have been still. Of voices that called for help in tones no human throat could make.
*When it comes, I'll be ready.*
The fog pressed closer, and somewhere in its depths, something laughed with a sound like breaking glass.