Chapter Text
Ice.
Freezing, hardening, brutal ice was the first thing you felt as your eyes reopened and focused on the cloudy sky above you.
Finally, a signal from your brain to move made its way to the rest of your body as you slowly began to regain feeling in your limbs. Every joint you had felt stiff, frozen solid, your movements delayed as you tried to lift your heavy head off of the ground and get a hold of what kind of situation you had woken up to find yourself in.
You resisted the urge to run a hand through your hair as the blood from your apparent head wound had formed a perfect crimson halo in the snow. Angelic… how fitting seeing as though you should probably be in Heaven right now. Or maybe Hell was the more appropriate destination? It was then that you realised you had no idea what kind of person you were. Or where you were. Or when you were. No name, no age, no reason for being where you were at all. The only thing you could be certain of is that something, or someone, had tried with great vigour to remove your left leg from your body, your jeans ripped to shreds from the knee down and covered with what you assumed was your own blood. As you looked closer, you could clearly make out bite marks in the flesh of your calf, dried blood surrounding it, wide and erratically placed teeth unlike any bite mark you’d ever seen. If, of course, you’d ever seen one at all.
The agony rushed through you all at once, as the numbing cold of the snow you’d been lying on for God knows how long faded away and left you with all the pain fitting an attack like the one you seemed to have been victim to. A stabbing pain in your leg, running all the way up to your inner thigh was only complimented by the nauseating foggy feeling coming from your head. When the throbbing of your leg waned, you could start to identify other smaller gashes and scrapes, but nothing compared to it. Wherever you were, it clearly wasn’t safe.
Looking around you, you seemed to be in a small village clearing surrounded by little dilapidated houses with years-worth of repairs, paint peeling from the outer walls, many a patchwork roof saved by sheets of scrap metal or mismatching wooden planks. Large gates and metal fences shut the buildings off from you, thick chains with heavy rusted padlocks protecting whoever was inside from whatever lurked on the outside. The houses all circled around a stone statue of a woman, shield in one hand and a sword in the other. The stance she took gave you the impression that she was poised to defend rather than attack, as if she were the silent protector of this place. If she was to be any representation of the village you found yourself in, you hoped you weren’t seen as a threat.
Peering over your shoulder, you could see a small garden of gravestones, inscriptions all too old to make out and neglected graves overrun by weeds. So many dead. A few freshly dug graves were still without a headstone, crudely constructed crucifixes acting as placeholders until a fitting memorial stone could be carved. Some of the new graves were much too small. You turned your head away quickly, shaking away the thought.
As you took in your surroundings and tried to gain some idea of where you might be, you suddenly couldn’t shake the feeling that something was watching you, quietly observing your movements from the shadows.
At this moment you dared not move anything but your eyes, frantically scanning the environment for any sign of the silent spectator. You couldn’t identify any signs of movement, as everything around you sat deathly still. Even the birds here seemed to be unbothered by your presence as a crow swooped down not a metre away from you to peck at the small, shiny innards of a dead mouse you’d neglected to notice. You couldn’t stay here. Even with your leg in this state, if you didn’t move soon, you feared whatever had attacked you in the first place was lurking just out of sight, waiting to finish the job. If it hadn’t already pinpointed you yet with its sight, the sound of your heart pounding in your chest was bound to draw it to you. You took a moment to silently draw in a breath of the frozen air and prepared to run for it. But run to where? Out of the corner of your eye you could just about make out what you thought to be the steeple of a church, roughly ten metres from you. If there were any people here who might show you a shred of mercy, you hoped it would be the religious fanatics of this God-forsaken place.
Moving so slowly as to not disturb the crow, you gave yourself a better view of your destination. It was, indeed, a steeple.
Just focus on the steeple you told yourself, don’t look at anything else but that steeple.
You tensed your feet in your boots. Despite them being practically frozen solid, you could still feel your toes on both legs. Considering the sorry state that your leg was in, you were amazed.
Next was fingers. Yep, you still had all ten. Well, at least you could feel all ten, you didn’t have the courage to try and look. Who needs fingers to run, anyway?
That was all you could check on without moving noticeably, and so you prepared yourself mentally to sprint as fast as you could across the clearing to the church gates. They were slightly ajar, only enough room to get maybe one foot through. You just hoped they weren’t too rusted to move any more.
One more deep breath.
Go.
Your right leg supported you in lifting your body from the ground as quickly as you could muster, your torso turning to face you directly in the path of the church gates, but as soon as it was time to move to the left, you faltered. The pain shot through you, and a cry of agony ripped its way out of your throat, bone-dry from breathing in the cold air. You fell over your leg, arms coming up in front of you to protect your head from another harsh collision with the ground. Amazingly, you seemed to roll over your leg completely, protecting your head and placing you flat against the ground on your back, staring straight up at the sky again.
Don’t. Fucking. Stop.
Using only your good limbs, you forced your body up and out from the snow, putting all your weight on your right leg and dragging the left behind you. Although it seemed like an eternity, you had made it about four steps closer to the church, finally feeling some semblance of hope that you may actually make it out of this alive. Until you heard the scream.
Less a scream, more a guttural hissing howl of pure, fear-inducing rage. A war cry. It sounded somewhat human, warped and mutated into something more animalistic, like a man trapped inside a beast’s body. If that sound was coming from the creature that left your leg like this, you didn’t want to find out what it looked like.
Panic set in, as you realised that cry could have only meant one thing.
It can see you.
With no other options in sight, you put everything you had left in you into hobbling over to the gates, the slight upwards slope leading to the church battling against you as you tried to gain traction against the slush forming beneath you. Every step felt like pushing a dagger deeper and deeper into your leg, but the alternative of just lying down to die didn’t suit you just yet.
Even if it could see you, there was still a chance that you had managed to injure it before when it first attacked you, right? I mean, how else would you have gotten away alive? And if you had escaped it once, you could do it again.
Adrenaline coursed through your veins at last, heart racing, pumping your blood as fast as it could to get you to that church as soon as humanly possible. With every step closer to possible salvation, you could feel yourself becoming lighter, your breaths quickened, and even a smile started to prick at the corners of your lips. But it wasn’t enough.
You were about five steps from the gates, so close to safety, warmth, possibly protection, when blade-like claws dug their way deep into the flesh of your right shoulder and whipped you around to face the creature responsible for that cutting scream you’d heard mere moments ago.
Face to face with the beast that had been stalking you, there was only one thought left in your dazed little head.
This is how I die.
At first, the figure standing before you was a man. Then, it was something that used to be a man. It had hair, scraggly, long, and wild like a man. It had clothes, practically rags, torn and bloodied but still, like a man. But the eyes were nothing like the eyes of a man. The irises took up the entire space, like a wolf, a glazed icy blue with tiny pupils in the centre, focused intensely on you. The teeth were a perfect match for the bite marks on your leg, sharp as razors and jagged against each other, as if they’d all been forced through the gums at once. Surrounding the teeth was a bloody mouth, snarling at you, ready to tear out your throat and finish you off by ripping your body limb from limb.
Against your better instincts, you closed your eyes as you accepted your fate at the hands of this monster. Escape was impossible, you had seconds left at best. You only wished that you had remembered a single detail about who you were, what you were leaving behind, who would be left to mourn you. You prayed to any deity that might be listening for a quick death and hoped that wherever you ended up after this thing was done with you would be warmer than where you had woken up.
All that effort, all that pain, for what? You may as well have just sat there and waited to die. At least then you would have prevented yourself from getting your hopes up, thinking it was ever possible to get away.
As you prepared yourself for the pain, the screaming, and ultimately nothing, all that you felt was the splash of something warm and wet on your face. You frowned. The snarling had stopped.
You opened your eyes to see a bloody stump. The scraggly hair, wolfish eyes, vicious mouth all gone. The headless body slumped to the floor in front of you, a pool of dark blood pouring from its neck, melting into the white snow. Your body soon followed, knees buckled, and you fell to the floor once again as the shock of what you had just seen set in. Then, panic, as you realised that whatever had decapitated the beast was now aware of your presence. Again, you prayed that this new threat was only concerned with the beast, and would leave you alone, uninterested in something so defenceless and weak.
The adrenaline gone, your fight no more, you fell back onto the icy ground and stared up at the overcast sky as you felt yourself slipping back into unconsciousness. Your eyes slowly lost focus, and the clouds above you turned into mist, tree branches blending into one. From your blurry eyes, you saw the crow fly off above you, leaving you behind in that death filled place.
Just before you faded out, a male figure appeared, towering above you, a wide brimmed hat on his head.