Tale of Cold

The morning air was crisp, not yet as frozen as it should have been but held warning it would approach it seen with the billows of steam that rolled off anything warm in the glimmering sunlight. The shelters, the tents, backs of horses and maws of the wolves, looking inviting to ward off the chill.
Usually there was little reason to be up so early, in the spring and summer where in sleep was not a luxury, but the chores had doubled with the coming frosts, the work just to stay alive was so much more daunting that one person would not be able to do alone. There were preparations to be made, materials to gather, food to hunt and salt and dry to last when there was no prey but carrion of those poor animals that didn't flee for warmer, more southerly lands.
Ryoten started with preparing his rounds, untangling himself from his partner and children, allowing them to sleep at least an hour more until it was truly daylight. He reignited the fire as soon as he was dressed, all skin covered from the blistering sun, bringing flames back from dying embers to start a morning coffee atop it, a cut of meat beside the kettle sizzling away on the iron rack.
"Good morning."
He jumped at the words, laughing himself at the muffled reaction to his startle.
"Mornin' Auntie Jun, you sleep well?"
"Would have been better were it not for the hole in my tent flap, the wind last night was terrible." She sat beside him, wrapping her cloak over him and rubbing her hands together over the fire.
"I'll see about getting Burke to fix it later today, if he's not busy with the fish."
"Thank you."
Sometimes the pack would rise on their own, ready to start the day and begin their own chores, if only to avoid the annoyance of Ryoten wandering the camp with a cast iron pan in one hand and the other a metal spoon to bang on it with, a crude alarm that never failed to get even the deepest sleepers up.
"Shia's hooves are more pleasant to hear at the crack of dawn, Ryo."
"I could say Myrena crying for her teether is also more pleasant at midnight than you and Cori-"
"Boys." Jun stopped their argument before it started, pointing to the children already gathering around the table for breakfast, their bleary eyed parents all taking turns at the kettle for their morning doses of caffeination .
“How about-” Another tent rustled as North clambered out of it. “-That I would rather hear nothing at all in the morning and just sleep, for once?”
“Hound, is there any coffee left?”
“Dad, have you seen my sweater?”
It was a normal morning. A bit windy, a bit chilly, but sure to warm up as the sun rose, the land soaked in the light, as the clouds drifted further east and out to sea. The pack began their chores, Orion the last bits of his homework on his laptop, there was nothing in the day to say it wouldn’t be like any other.
At sundown, the cold rolled in.
A cold so brutal, so encroaching on everything it touched, it was a beast that had been there before anything else, and threatened to remain so after everything else had long since become dust.
Uncaring.
Immovable.
Seemingly eternal in its grasp on every bit of living flesh it could get its claws into, and it would, for there was seemingly no amount of cloth, leather, fur, nor wool that could stave it off. No amount of firewood, kerosene, gasoline, magic, or fuel not even yet dreamed up could keep it at bay as every fire threatened to go out under its howling screaming winds and icy talons.
The sheer winds were razors and cut through any attempt at using his own mana to keep the wind out of the tent. Further attempts risked depleting his aura completely, scattering out into the wind. He gave up trying, instead huddling and hunkering down in his tent, as close to the middle of bodies he knew had to be warm as much as he could. Somehow, they felt as icy and dead as the snow around, despite their chattering teeth, shivering flesh, raised hackles. Baby Dog and infant clutched to his chest, Orion clinging to his side beneath his shawl, the most protection he could offer, all he could do was wait and hope.
Wait and hope that in the morning, sheer determination, luck, and stubbornness would have left them alive. Even the brothers, Burke and Walter, who plowed through feet of snow as if it wasn’t even there had joined him and his family, their massive bodies blocking a good deal of the wind, but it meant that instead of him or his son or his infant daughter taking it, they took the brunt of it themselves, fur raised in desperate attempt to catch any warmth that remained.
Coriander, similarly, was puffed into something more akin to a pom-pom, completely having shed his usual form, instead the massive and twisted feline one reserved most times for battle, for war, for skirmish.
Ryoten supposed that’s what this had become, at this point. A war against the ever biting cold and its rampage.
Coriander glanced at him, golden eyes that normally shined with vigor reduced to a mere shimmer of deep discomfort, and he twisted, his tail encircling round Ryoten’s own neck, a makeshift scarf that offered nothing but the comfort of a gesture made silently and in good heart.
Usually Selene and Jun would joke about ‘youngin’s’ like himself, the brothers, the actual children themselves not having learned to take a simple storm. A little wind, a little frost. Their silence was more worrying than the howling outside, trees seeming to burst apart from the torrents of ice and flurries of razor-like snow only held back by scrap wood and canvas. They offered no quips to say they had seen anything like it before, that they had survived something like it and come out just fine. Their lack of words only gleamed that there was deep and untold horror, a quiet too familiar to be just worry over the unknown.
Centuries seemed to pass but also no time at all. Every second felt as if it hadn’t moved, but at the same time, contained eons within itself.
What he could only guess were every few minutes, Ryoten nudged Myrena, curled up just below his throat where his hot lifeblood flowed, just to make sure she was awake, that she was breathing, that she hadn’t succumbed. She didn’t cry nor wail, babble and beg for food that he couldn’t even hope to warm up enough for her. The fire, nearly dead as it may be, was outside, in the white death. Even so few feet away, the walls of sleet and ice and snow and hail were battering down, sure to confuse and obfuscate the tent should anyone leave its barely offered safety. If he left it to heat up a bottle, there was the good chance he’d freeze before he made it back.
North. Burke. Coriander. Walter. Jun. Selene. Orion. Myrena. His love. Himself. The dogs.
Never before had there been a situation worth shoving all of them into one tent. The next over was worse, with Wolfthorn, Nishka and Haus, the foals, a war wolf or two and the navigators from this region. Even with so many, the tents may as well as been empty for all the warmth they provided. Ryoten desperately wanted to take off his gloves to warm his fingers, surely frostbitten, with his breath, but knew better.
A storm not even with a fourth of this one’s wake had seen the amputation of a whole leg, several fingers, a nose and ears before. That one hadn’t been halfway up a mountain at the tail end of winter and creeping of spring. That one should have been the worse one, but felt like nothing in the uncaringness of this.
The storm did not care what it took, or what it left. It was incapable of such, and somehow, it was even more dreadful. It had no spite or wrath, it was just wind and precipitation but that was the worse of it- He would have rathered it to be a hateful thing purging all caught within it out of anger, for things capable of such thought were also capable of mercy, of sparing the young, the sick, the vulnerable, even at their worst.
The storm had no such thoughts, no such emotions, and held no ability to have mercy.
Somehow morning did come.
It felt as though a millenia had passed in the span of a single night, only noticed to have finally concluded from the sounds of crows cawing, the scavengers who also had somehow survived coming out of whatever frozen hollows that had protected them to feast on those that did not. At first, He thought perhaps they had simply come in the night, perhaps an oddity of this region, but found instead that so much snow and ice had built up on the tent that it completely obscured the light of day shining down, oblivious to the horrors of only mere hours ago.
Shakily, at first, the pack began to stir, almost terrified to look outside the confines of their shelter to assess the damage, to take stock of who other than their own cramped tent was still left and not left a husk. Of who would be left behind as naught but a frozen body to be claimed by the permafrost, and remain perhaps forever.
It didn’t seem anyone else got more sleep than he did, and he was unsure if he slept at all, busying himself counting his breaths to keep track of the time to shake awake his son and daughter and make sure they still breathed as well.
Coriander was the first to move, climbing down from perched upon Burke’s rump to carefully step between tangled bodies and poke his head outside, a low snarl in his throat when the snow poured in the tent as if it tainted him, as if he could have possibly been made more cold by it. Him getting up was as if set off a chain reaction, of all others checking their limbs and rubbing their legs to get circulation back into them to get outside of the tent as fast as possible.
Ryoten shielded Orion’s eyes from the horse and wolf-shaped lumps in the snow as they passed them, not that there was anything to see but the implication of what had happened, the natural result of there just simply not being enough room, and hard decisions having to have been made.
“...I wanna go home.”
It was the first thing anyone had said since drawing straws on whose horses and whose dogs got to be in the tents, before the worst of it before the sun had even gone down. Orion’s shaky words really, in the matter of it, didn’t mean anything, they had no home. They were wanderers. Nomads. It was understood regardless.
Home was not here.
Safety was not here.
Here was a tragedy narrowly avoided, the cruel wrath of nature only barely scraped through. His fingers hurt as he cupped the boy’s face, nodding in agreement with frost falling out of his hair. He put the boy and his sister on Haus and ride with North in time to leave for town down the mountain for him to miss the cruel reality that followed- not every lump in the snow was gone, there were far fewer peaceful deaths among the animals caught outside than Orion knew, he was already on the trail as he, Selene, and Jun uncovered the suffering beasts that still remained, wheezing, frost bitten, frozen to the ground, and put them down as quickly as they could, buckshot leaving pellets and bright red paint on the pure white of the land.
Down the trail, only seen by the clear path cut through the trees, he could only hope that North hadn’t pointed out other frozen masses in the snow, nor the colorful mitts rimmed with ice barely peeking through of those that tried to walk their way down, that the man was smart enough to let ignorance be bliss. To let Orion just be shaken and not haunted by what had transpired, how narrowly those he called family had scraped by.