The snowstorm does not care that Morvayn is dying.

  Wind drives ice into his face with the patience of something that has already won. Each gust steals breath before it reaches his lungs. The world has become white in all directions, an erasure so complete that direction itself has lost meaning.

  Morvayn crawls.

  His hands find purchase in snow that collapses beneath him, the crust breaking through to softer accumulation beneath, his arms sinking to the elbow before touching something solid enough to push against. His knees drive forward, one and then the other. The wound in his side opens with every lurch forward, heat bleeding out of him into cold.

  He cannot see where he is going.

  He crawls anyway.

  The numbness began in his feet, hours ago or longer, time having become unreliable in ways he cannot track. It spread upward through his calves and into his thighs with the slow patience of a beast stalking prey, and now it has reached his hips, his lower back, creeping toward the center of him where the wound waits like an open door. His hands still feel, but the feeling is wrong. Distant. As if the signals travel through walls before reaching him.

  He thinks of his family.

  He has been thinking of them for so long now that the thoughts have worn grooves into his mind, the same images returning in sequence like droplets falling into a waiting bucket. His father's hands. His mother's voice. Kelan's shoulders. And always, at the end of the sequence, small legs swinging beneath a bench that is too tall for her.

  The wind shifts. Snow drives into his eyes and he squeezes them shut, continuing forward blind, trusting instinct or something he mistakes for instinct. Home is in this direction. It must be. The alternative is not something he can consider and continue moving, so he does not consider it.

  His elbow strikes something beneath the snow. Rock, perhaps, or frozen earth where the accumulation has not reached. The impact sends a jolt through the numbness, brief and bright, and for a moment he can feel his arm again. Can feel the cold, which is worse than the numbness but at least confirms he is still present in his own body.

  Morvayn does not think about surviving.

  He stopped thinking about surviving some time ago, though he cannot identify the exact moment when that thought released its hold and drifted away like breath into the storm.

  He thinks about his little sister instead—Nemi.

  The images arrive with a clarity that cuts through the fog settling over his awareness. Her face when he left that morning, still soft with sleep, her hair tangled from the pillow. She had said something to him, some small thing about the hunt, about bringing back something good, and he had promised he would. He had promised.

  He keeps crawling.

  The dizziness arrives without warning.

  One moment he is moving, hands finding snow, knees driving forward. The next the world tilts and his grip on the present loosens, the storm fading to gray at the edges of his vision, consciousness sliding sideways into somewhere else. Something between, a space where the present releases its hold and memory rushes in to fill the gap.

  The ledge.

  He had been hunting. The forest had been quiet in that particular way forests are sometimes quiet, a held-breath quality that should have been warning but read instead as opportunity. He had found a position on a rocky shelf above a game trail, waiting with the long spear balanced across his knees, his breath slow and even, his attention divided between the path below and the calculations running beneath his thoughts.

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  The quota. The stele and how far the water had to rise. Odrin's smile, sharp and satisfied, as he spoke of alternatives that were not alternatives at all.

  He was thinking about these things when the presence arrived.

  It came without sound. Without movement. One moment he was alone on the ledge, the forest still and patient around him. The next he was not alone, and the distinction between these two states could not be traced to any specific sensation. No breath on his neck. No footstep behind him. No shadow falling across stone where no shadow had been.

  Simply the understanding, absolute and immediate, that something was aware of him.

  His skin responded before his mind did. Every hair rising along his arms and the back of his neck. The cold that finds skin that was warm, spreading across his shoulders and down his spine with the particular chill of being watched. The sick certainty that whatever observed him did not regard him as a person. Did not regard him as anything that mattered.

  He tried to turn.

  He could not.

  The realization arrived slowly, then all at once. He was present in his own flesh and could not move a single muscle that had not already been moving.

  The horror of this had no name.

  The voice did not come from outside.

  It came from somewhere behind his thoughts, occupying a space that should have been private. The words formed with a clarity worse than shouting, each syllable precise and absolute, leaving no room for misunderstanding or pretense.

  Your kind are not welcome here, human.

  He tried to answer, tried to apologize, but he could not speak.

  Jump.

  One word. Smaller than the first sentence. More terrible for its smallness.

  He fought the command.

  Everything in him that had ever refused anything poured into resistance. His love for Nemi, her songs with wrong syllables in all the right places. His fear for his father's leg that would not heal properly, for his mother's hands that had worked too hard for too long, for his brother's certainty that carried weight he should not have to carry alone. His own desire to live, which he had not fully understood until this moment because he had never before been required to choose it.

  He fought with everything he had.

  He jumped anyway.

  The ledge dropped away beneath him, rock giving way to empty air.

  The sensation of falling was the last thing that belonged entirely to him.

  The memory releases him.

  His hands are in the snow again, sinking through the crust, the cold rushing back to replace the remembered warmth of that morning on the ledge. He does not know how long he was absent from the present. Time has become a thing that happens to other people, that flows past him without carrying him along.

  The wound speaks in languages he has stopped trying to translate. He knows what it says. He has known since before he started crawling, since he pulled himself from the snow at the base of the cliff and discovered that his body had broken in ways that would not mend. The knowing does not help. Does not hurt. Simply exists alongside everything else, one more fact in a collection of facts that have stopped mattering.

  He lifts his head.

  Through the storm, through the white erasure of the world, he sees something. Or believes he sees something. A darkness that might be the farmhouse against a lighter darkness of falling snow. The suggestion of smoke, or steam rising from the paddies, or both, climbing into a storm that swallows everything before it can escape.

  He cannot tell how far.

  He cannot tell if it is real.

  It does not matter. It is the direction he will crawl.

  He pulls himself forward. His arms shake with effort that should be nothing, that would have been nothing this morning when he left with the spear balanced across his shoulders and his mother's voice telling him to be careful. His body has become a territory he no longer fully controls, muscles responding to commands he issues but no longer quite believes in.

  His arms give out.

  One moment they are holding him up and then they are not, and he is lying face-down in the snow, and the cold has stopped feeling like cold, and the wound has stopped feeling like anything at all.

  He turns his head.

  One last act of will, small and enormous.

  The farm is still there in the distance, or the suggestion of it is still there, warm light bleeding through the storm where candles burn in windows or fires burn in hearths or both. Steam rises from the paddies, heat meeting cold, the false summer his father maintains through labor that costs more each year. The terraces descend the hillside in steps that hold water that feeds crops that sustain a family that will wake tomorrow to find him gone.

  The stele stands at the water's edge, marking what is owed. The level has not risen enough. The quota remains unfilled. This too is a kind of measurement, a way of marking how far short he has fallen.

  He thinks of Nemi then.

  The false summer's grace reaches him across the distance, or he imagines that it does. Impossible heat finding a boy who is already past saving. He cannot feel his body anymore, but he can feel this, or believes he can, the suggestion of warmth against skin that has stopped reporting.

  The farm hangs in the distance, small and warm and entirely unreachable.

  He does not close his eyes.

  The snow closes them for him.

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