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.

Until tonight. Something was different tonight. There remained an edge to this darkness that made his hairs rise. Four days after they had ridden north, further and further from their barracks in Polynak in search of men that had gone missing. Each had been worse than the one that came before it, but this day—it held to it a malevolence that Viktor cannot place.

Whatever was watching them was cold and implacable.

Viktor wanted nothing more than to return to the safety of his tent. He was confident the others felt much the same, but he did not share it with Kozlov within hearing.

Komandr Kozlov was the youngest son of an old house with far too many heirs. Younger than Viktor by some years, he was lithe and graceful, dark-haired and grey-eyed. Nearly half-year had passed since he joined the Second Army, given a rank many coveted for the safety it assured. Komandr's in the Second Army rarely went into front lines themselves.

"They instructed us to find the men that had gone missing," Viktor said, shifting from foot-to-foot to keep warmth in his body. "We did that. We shouldn't linger any longer."

Kozlov did not seem to hear him. He studies the deepening twilight in a manner that Viktor recognised as insouciance. "Some of these men are still missing limbs, Tovarish Sobol."

"I'm sure their families are just happy with having something to bury," Zima says. He had covered the dead in a thick, abrasive sheet, but Viktor still sees the blood that seeps onto the ground, dark and dense.

The astute, weathered man of nearly fifty years peers into the distance, where the trees have drawn close and the horizon had gone cloudless. His brows furrow and lips thin. "The boy is right. We have done what we could for these men. May they find peace amongst the Saints."

Each man recites the phrase, for no man's future was secure. Death would come for them all in the end.

Kozlov concedes, and Viktor cannot help the sigh of relief that escapes him.

Yet, even as they begin the journey from the depth of the forest, his nerves do not unravel. They are taut, his fingers trembling, his breathing near uneven. Zima takes notes of this and inquired of his state of being. But before Viktor could even explain the terror that grips him, the air resounds with a low, snarling growl.

The sound of his boots crunching in the thick snow is lost in the din of whatever beast draws nearer. The men exchange glances, guns freed from their hostlers and eyes narrowing as their heads turn toward the growling.

It surrounds them, this low, ravenous growl, raising the hair on their arms. The rifle in his hand weighs down his arm, unsettled by the tremors that course through his body.

"Be on the guard," instructed Kozlov.

Something is coming, Viktor thinks, jaw unwilling to loosen as fear festers in the pit of his stomach. And like the deafening of a storm that been brewing for ages, the beast makes itself known. Viktor does not wait to see what it is, does not even think to stay with his party and assist them.

He ran, rifle abandoned to snow and heart hammering viciously in his chest. Gunfire shatters the air, the scent of it sharp and metallic. He could hear screaming, a litany of curses and prayers for help, his name thrown into the mixture.

"Sobol! Sobol!"

His name, a mantra, a plea.

He ignores it.

The trees surround him, growing denser and closer till he feels as though he may suffocate from how they surround him. No matter how far his feet seem to carry him, the screams and gunfire do not grow further, the reverberating snarls of the beast too close for comfort.

When Viktor stops, it is not by his own violation. His feet crumble beneath him, hands buried in the snow and breathing coming in short, painful, greedy mouthfuls.

Get up, he thinks, insists and demanding of his body. Get up. Get up. Get up.

It denies him, frightful and weakened by a presence that is as ancient and smouldering as the seas. There is a burst of hot air against the nape of his neck, and Viktor squeezes his eyes shut, prayers on his lips.

"You're scared," comes a voice, and there is a wrongness to it, for it fills the air, low and lazy and cold as the winters in Kosirovo. It is young, a child's voice, and Viktor raised his head to find a boy before him.

He is small and pale and frail, this boy with wide, unblinking eyes. They are unnerving, those eyes.

"W-what –"

"You left them to die," the boy said, a curious tilt to his head, and Viktor's stomach lurched. The gunfire had ceased, the pleas silenced. "They died quickly if it makes you feel any better. "

His vision swims.

"You should leave. You do not belong here."

Viktor recoils from the touch of little fingers against his cheek. They are cold and biting, burrowing deep within his flesh. The boy inclines his head to the path ahead.

"Leave your dead and do not return to these woods."

Viktor stands, movements unsteady and stiff, as though his body was no longer his own. "When they sleep, they dream, and woods dream with them. It shifts and alters to reflect what they see, what they desire," the boy said, walking beside Viktor, his bare feet leaving no impression upon the ground. "You were going in circles, you know. I saw you – all of you – wandering in the same clearing several times, complaining of the days that pass."

A sense of dread washes over Viktor. They had been walking in circles; the boy said – each day no different from the last, each step a duplicate. His stomach aches at the thought.

"It was playing with you," the boy continued, "leaving the bodies where you would come upon them, baiting you closer to its den." He turned to look up at Viktor with those unnatural irises of his, and Viktor flinched. "It was going to eat you."

"W-what... H-how?"

"Sometimes it eats them, sometimes it doesn't," he says in that voice of his – timeless and mellifluous. "Sometimes it kills them slowly, sometimes it lets them suffer."

"H-how do you know this?"

The boy does not answer him, and Viktor fears asking again. They walk for what seems like hours, days, until the trees recede into the corners of his vision and sun rises into the heavens. The horizon is crimson and gold and vibrant; it is alive, and the air smells of pine and wood-smoke and dawning of a long winter. Viktor jerks forward, his body once more his own, and he hurries forward, pausing only to glance over his shoulder at the boy that stands at the mouth of Greatwoods.

"Are you – will you be staying there?" Viktor asked, slow and uncertain. Part of him wants to bring the boy with him, see him into an orphanage where he will be looked after. Another significant part of him fears that doing so would do more harm for others.

When those golden irises level with his own and a curl of a smile dawns the boys' lips, his heart sinks. "I will come with you."