He lay there wedged between ribs and cooling muscle, trying to get leverage with his hands pressed into the hole. Worked the edges wider with his fingers. The mass of coagulated blood was thinnest there, where the rib had already punched through.

  He braced his hands against the edges and pushed. The blood seal cracked first, branching from the finger-sized hole, breaking like dirty ice. The muscle underneath tore with a wet, fibrous sound as he forced his shoulder into the gap. Snow struck him the instant his head cleared the ribs. It came sideways needling his face, driving into his eyes, packing into the open seam he’d torn. Heat rushed out from within the wyvern with a hiss as sharp cold air flooded the breach. He squinted into the blinding white.

  “God damn it’s cold.”

  The village appeared in fractures, flickers in the howling storm. A black chimney shouldered into view and was swallowed again. A sagging roofline flickered between gusts. A wall leaned where no wall should lean. Everything else was motion. Snow crossing snow, the air thick with it, the ground indistinguishable from the sky unless something dark interrupted it.

  He blinked and lost the world. The storm hadn’t broken, but the Wyvern was turning into a meat popsicle and he had to look for alternatives. He pulled one arm free and the wind tore at his sleeve like it wanted to peel him apart. Snow blew into the cavity and melted against clot and exposed meat, only to freeze again in a thin whitening crust.

  He tried lifting his leg, but the blood didn’t move like blood anymore. It had gone thick and heavy, clinging to his boots in ropes and sheets. Locking him into the filled cavity. Putting force into his leg led to the crust cracking around his calves and liquid blood rushed in to fill the gap. It kept him locked inside like a cement of blood and cold that gripped him tightly. He tried pushing. Tried pulling. He was stuck.

  "Shit."

  He twisted instead and raised his hand into the air. The movement made the wyvern rock. The carcass shifted, its pterodactyl wing splaying outward. The wind caught it and the entire body yawed a fraction. He compensated. Threw his weight opposite. The movement inside translated slowly outside, like steering a barge by shifting cargo. The nose of the corpse corrected by degrees.

  His hand was starting to numb under the assault of the wind. The gecko surfaced from his palm and climbed up further along his fingers, its head swiveling around. The snow bore the load. That was the only reason this worked. Six meters of scaled mass spread over drifts that would have swallowed him into the deep had he tried walking.

  “Mug?” Christofer asked aloud.

  Snow scraped under the scale. The white world roared. He squinted, trying to nail a landmark to go by. Drifts and shadows and the occasional dark tooth of wreckage flickered by. He shifted, testing its weight against the drifts. The snow underneath acted like a sled surface. The gecko’s head swiveled around like a compass.

  “Forty-five degrees to the left.” rippled from the gecko.

  Christofer glanced to the gecko and planted his palms against the inner wall and shoved to the right. The carcass pivoted broadside to the wind, and suddenly the force was different. No longer pushing but dragging. He shoved again. The wyvern lurched forward a handspan, the mass around his legs sagged and resettled. The stink of iron and cooling meat filled nose until breathing felt like swallowing rust.

  “The energy imparted on the mug should’ve kept it warm. Enough to cause a significant dimple in the snow,” rippled from the gecko

  Each push cost him breath. The wyvern had become something of a sled. He couldn’t see, so he relied on the gecko as his watch tower. He shoved again. The interior around his legs tore and resettled. Thickened blood crawled into the space he made and tightened as the cold seeped deeper through the opening.

  “Two meters.”

  The air inside the cavity was no longer warm. It was cooling fast. Snow crossed the breach in sheets, erasing depth. If there was a dimple out there, it was being buried breath by breath. Each twist of his body cascaded through the dead wyvern. He threw his weight into the cavity to the left and the right. It lurched forward unsteadily, like he was trying to walk with it. The movement had shifted from something like a corpse-raft, to leveraged rocking motions, like a carcass-canoe instead. He leaned his head over the breach and squinted into the white. The gust of wind caught something. It skimmed, dipped. For half a heartbeat the surface ahead stopped rippling and twirled. There. A shallow sag. Subtle.

  “That it?” he yelled.

  The wind returned and the shape blurred. He spat the snow that flew into his mouth. He pushed. The corpse slid another handspan and a wingtip caught hard on a drift. The entire body lurched, halted, twisted. For a second he thought the wing would anchor them in place.

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  “Affirmative.” rippled from the gecko.

  He shifted inside, pressing upward and inward, changing the balance point. The weight redistributed. Snow compressed. The wing tore free with a muffled shudder and slapped into the body. He was breathing iron again. Cold iron now.

  The dimple was nearly gone. He tore a rib loose with a wet crack more than a squelch. The bone felt brittle in his grip, slick where frost was forming over blood. He leaned out as far as he dared and drove it into the snow at the shallow sag. The wind tried to wrench it from his hands. He stubbornly gripped it tighter. He pushed it into the snow, pressing his arm down to the elbow. He wiggled it, widening the channel. Snow collapsed inward in slow folds. He felt for something that was not snow, not ice. The rib struck porcelain with a small, defiant sound. He froze. There. He worked the bone beneath it, levering gently, careful not to send it deeper. Snow sloughed aside. A curved edge surfaced. White made grey by cold, smeared in dark red that had gone almost brown.

  “Gecko. Handle.”

  The gecko’s tongue lanced out and held. Catching on the handle. He cleared more snow with the rib, pushing it aside in controlled sweeps, the wind trying to reclaim every handful he displaced. When the mug finally broke free, it came all at once, sliding up the improvised channel and snapping into open air. The mug spun in the air.

  It struck the coagulated mass around his thighs and settled there. For a moment he simply stared at it. Coated in a hue of varying degrees of red, from dried brick to very vividly wyvern blood that smeared under his thumb. The ceramic body was unmarred despite having punched through bone and brain at high velocity. Not even a scratch. He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding and pressed his forehead briefly against the ceramic. He sucked in a deep breath and exhaled deeply. Then he tucked it inside his gambeson.

  The storm drove against the carcass, forcing snow through the opening, packing it around his shoulders. The cavity was losing its insulation. If he stayed here much longer, the blood around his legs would finish hardening into something closer to stone.

  “Next objective. Shelter.” Christofer yelled out.

  The storm flickered and searching for a clear image was out of the question. So he searched for interruption. Something that moved the storm. Interruption. The wind moved in currents; where it split and curled, something stood against it. Ahead, slightly right, the gale bent strangely. Snow did not strike there with the same force. It sheared, divided, streamed around an absence. A darker mass held its outline longer than anything else.

  He angled the corpse toward it. The wind caught the wings again, trying to turn him broadside. He heaved his body weight, crashing into the body to the right again and again. When the wind lost grip, he threw himself back and forth again, forcing the massive body to crab forward through the drifts. Each shove cost him breath. Each correction tightened the blood’s grip around his legs. The darker shape resolved in pieces: Timber thrust through the sea of white, black with soot, or a stone chimney stood alone where the rest of the house had collapsed. A roof that did not collapse when the gust hit it, beams blackened by smoke, a doorway half-choked with snow but still rectangular. The walls were framed with stone. The outline gained shape. It was a smithy. Although based on the wear and tear, it looked like it had been abandoned for months, if not years.

  He aimed the wyvern’s head for the opening. The snout struck the threshold and scraped. Snow avalanched from the lintel down over scale. He shoved again. The body resisted, wedged for a moment as the wind pressed against the exposed wings like sails. He threw his weight sharply to one side. The angle shifted. The head slipped through, and then the breach lurched inside. The wind cut off. The roar dulled to a distant battering against walls instead of a knife against skin.

  Snow no longer crossed the breach in sheets. It fell in stray spirals through the doorway behind them. He pushed one last time and the rest of the carcass scraped inside, scale against stone, chain dragging over packed snow. Silence settled in layers. Above him, beams. Ahead, the dark mouth of a forge. Beside it, a pile of charcoal that had not yet been claimed by drift or storm. He let his head rest briefly against the inner rib.

  Outside, the blizzard continued to erase the village. He brought down the mug like a guillotine. The rounded edge of the mug slamming into the mass that held his legs, which cracked a visible seam. He grabbed each side of the breach tightly and pulled himself up as blood rushed back to fill the void. He wrenched his legs free with a wet squelch, landing hard on the cobble stone. One boot stayed behind, stuck in the wyvern. He shot up to his feet, the cold stone floor almost burning against his foot as he leaned in and pulled the boot loose and stomped his foot back inside it. Wind howled through the open door.

  He dug his heels in, pulled, and twisted the wyvern's body to reach the door. The paralytic blade tipped away, the edge cutting into a wall. He let go and stomped with unsteady steps forward, pulling the door shut. The sound of the wind softened further, but kicked itself against the door.

  Wedging his boot against the door, pressing into the edge of the door he leaned forward and pulled a heavy rusted drawbar from the snow inside. The door kicked back into his leg. He put his full weight and slammed his shoulder into the door. The wind whistled through the gaps. He wedged the drawbar into the metal brackets on door and frame. The door held and remained closed, secured by the rusty drawbar despite the wind grabbing at the door.

  “Holy shit man.” Christofer squeezed out of him between breaths.

  He stared back at the beams crossing overhead, black with decades of smoke. Beyond them, the underside of a roof. Timber and thatch. A forge against the far wall. An anvil in the center, a block of iron darker than the shadows around it. The coal bin beside it, half full. An empty workbench along the left wall, its surface bare but scarred. Someone had grabbed everything not nailed down. Left stone and brick, black with use, a chimney rising through the roof. Another pile of charcoal sat beside it, almost waiting. An abandoned building.

  “From one carcass to another. But at least this one won’t freeze. I think.”

  The wood groaned overhead.