Episode 2

And I was alone.

My father had always warned me about coming into the mountains. There were two truths in life, he used to say: That the mountains were no place for farm folk, and that Uncle Ryle was a no good swindler. I’d learnt as a boy that my Uncle was not a swindler, he was just better at business. But many years later, I was finally learning my father wasn’t wrong about everything. But I had a purpose for being here; we all had a purpose. And we knew there were risks.

There was nothing left for me now. Nothing left but to finish what we started. I dug my boots into the snow beneath and trudged on. Where I was travelling — east, north, west, I had no idea — but I knew what I was looking for. I knew what I was hunting. Wraiths left behind a sort of luminous mist wherever they moved, like the shimmering trail of a slug. This was how we knew what had slaughtered the people of the village. This is how I knew what had killed my father. Often the trails meant it was easy to avoid the wraiths, but I wasn’t looking to avoid this one.

We’d found it already, or I should say, it had found us. Its bright frosty-blue eyes had emerged from in the encircling blizzard last night, appearing as if from nowhere out of the gloom. I immediately took a swing and missed, but it didn’t. It took out my navigator with a slash off its left claw, falling away into the blizzard, lost in the night forever. In the same movement, the beast carved up my companion with the right claw. There was no chance to defend ourselves, no chance to fight after that. We just had to run. It had now taken everyone from me. The last survivors. My family, my home. I couldn’t even go back to the farm, not really. Growing food on the frozen plains that lay in the shadow of these hellish mountains was damn-near impossible. Getting the conditions right in the frigid temperatures, where ice never left the ground, took a lifetime of experience and my father had not yet managed to teach me all I needed to know. Twenty-two years apparently was still not enough to be a farmer in a world ruled by frost. All I had now was my goal, our goal. To kill the beast that stole my future.

We weren’t even sure why it was in the village. Not in my lifetime, nor my father’s, nor his father’s before him, had a wraith left the mountains. He used to tell me all about them, as the hearth crackled away. The stories had grown even longer of late, with the new mining going on in the mountains. They brought to the village some new stone fuel, and with it, the fire burned longer than ever — which meant the stories just kept on going. Stories of monstrous creatures in the mountains..........

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