❛ IF THEY CANNOT SURVIVE, LET THEM DIE ❜
Children born into the shadows of war are never quite right. It is a truth that Vasily Aleksandrov has always known. He has never known peace, though he longed for it.
The Old Gods did not give privy to thos...
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THE DARKNESS DID NOT COME QUIETLY, as one would expect of it. Instead, the night came upon them quickly, bringing with it the low, moaning winds of the Dead Sea and unease. Viktor shifts the rifle in his hand, made weary and apprehensive by the situation he found himself within.
The Greatwoods is a vast expanse of sprawling green, thick underbrushes and towering trees that hid the beast of the woods from their vision. The field Doctor is still examining the body they had come upon — the twelfth since they began their expedition. Four days of travel into the heart of the Forest had given them their dead—be it the tattered remains of Second Army uniform, or the limbs the bodies had been missing upon discovery, Viktor cannot shake the consternation that sets his teeth together. He feels as though he is being watched.
It is not the idle, curious glance of an animal that is debating whether to make a meal of him, or to flee into the safety. It is a substantial, unwavering gaze that conceives sweat at the base of his brow.
"Perhaps we should leave," Viktor urged of his Komandr, teeth snapping together in response to the frigid air. Winters in Kosirovo were rarely hospitable, but never in all his years had he experienced a cold such as this. Even with the kvat in his system and bundled in thick furs and gloves, the skin of his face tightens and burns with each gust of sharp, cutting winds.
"Don't tell me you're frightened of the dead, Tovarish."
There is laughter amongst the party of men, their eyes scarcely visible behind the dark material of their scarves. Viktor bristles, but does not rise to the bait. "Dead is dead, Sir," he said, slowly. "It's not the dead I'm worried about. It's what made them this way."
"A wolf, I wager," Komandr Kozlov said, his gaze idle.
"This was no wolf," counters the Zima. He straightens from where he had been bent at the waist over the body, a shadow darkening his features as he wipes the blood from his hands. "Whatever killed these men did so intending to prolong their death."
"I didn't take you as the sort to believe in monsters, Doctor," Kozlov drawled, a hint of a smile in his voice even as the surrounding men grow quiet.
It reminds Viktor of the stories he was told as a child, shared whispers of primordial beings and ancient beasts that haunt the Forest; that when the Church stripped it of its name and proclaimed it to be the Greatwoods, the False Gods that slumbered within her roots stirred and the all that dwelled within, ancient croons that took children from their beds to devour, ravenous dogs and spirits, took to killing all those unfortunate enough to cross into the fold of old oaks. The Greatwoods had a way of changing people. Those who survive leave its grasp never quite the same; sometimes they leave the woods screaming and driven mad, too misshapen and beyond recognition. They carry within them a wrongness, a touch of corruption.
Viktor had laughed those stories away once he had joined the Second Army. He had seen the scourges of war, had tasted death and the murder of innocence. Haunted forest and bygone Gods held no terrors for him.
