Chapter 3: Winter

She raised her head the barest fraction. There it was. The sound that was not a sound. The footsteps of a man who no longer existed, slowly approaching the bridge.
She sucked in an eager breath, and slowly rose from her knees. Muscles ached and shuddered as she moved for the first time in over twenty-eight hours. Then adrenaline kicked in, burning away discomfort, and she slithered quietly through the snow towards her target.

***

Kaed hated the cold seasons here. This total freezing over of the world was completely unnatural. Choked sunlight, chill winds every hour of the day, this awful, wretched snow and ice. Everything out here froze, died, and was consumed. He could feel it happening to his thin flesh already, the stinging burn of his body struggling to maintain warmth.

The cold seasons were supposed to be a time of calming rest, cooling down, a period of rejuvenation. In this part of the world, it was a time of misery, often death. People were caged in their own homes, sometimes trapped in other buildings or inadequate shelters, with no safe way to return. What a terrible existence to endure for an entire season.

Kaed had no intention of hanging around in the snow long enough to be that miserable. He could never again return to his own country, but there must be other parts of the world where the land was less hateful, and the environment was as it should be. The people, of course, would be consequently stronger. Kaed hated weakness, hated a people who were collectively weak. It made him feel frustrated and helpless, that they were too broken to see the beauty of natural life, of the order of the world, of the challenges that could build character and imbue one with life and joy. But they only strove to force the universe to their will, to destroy and remake and alter things to their pleasure. It sickened Kaed to see such self-imposed blindness.

His own people were also losing their strength. They called out for changes to millenia-old laws and traditions, choosing easier pathways and simpler, more cruel punishments to the trespassers of their Rule. They were being tainted with the shallow minds of the weaker peoples, and were seeking to impose their self-righteous destruction on the very landscape.

Kaed knew better, and he was eternally grateful for it. Even in this damning exile, he knew. He would die in truth before he saw his people to regress into these winters of ice. He would save every last one of them from their own folly, even if it cost him what was left of his soul.