The pale horse did not tire. Its rider—less certain.
Grimm's breath came in measured clouds, his ribs rising and falling like an exhausted forge. The wastes stretched endlessly about him, a white desert of frozen breath and skeletal light. Ahead, the lone silhouette of a man crested a ridge, black against the moon.
The cultist had been running all night. Running from what he'd seen. Running from the forest, and from the truth that had followed him out of it.
But Grimm would not stop. G'norr would not allow it.
The voice came not through the air but through the marrow of Grimm's skull; ancient, layered, a resonance older than human breath itself.
"Faster," it beckoned. "The flesh weakens. The will does not."
The horse obeyed before its master did; hooves cracking the ice as though crushing brittle glass. The land below them folded inward: the black horizon of a village, small and half-swallowed by the hills. Smoke rose in crooked lines, ghostly and slow, as if the town itself were exhaling.
The fleeing cultist vanished into its throat.
Grimm reined his mount to a halt. Steam flared from its nostrils, curling into the night air like pale tendrils of some living fog.
He surveyed the settlement; houses bowed beneath snow, windows shuttered, no sound but the creak of cold wood. A town asleep. Or pretending to be.
A wind cut across the brim of his long black hat, flinging flecks of snow toward the spire that crowned the hill; a thin, stone belltower whose shape seemed to tilt wrong when stared at too long.
Direction.
The reigns cracked.
The pale horse lunged, snow exploding beneath its iron-shod hooves like shattering bones. Grimm did not ask why G'norr hungered for this one soul more than the thousands Grimm had already reaped. He had learned untold ages ago that questions were meat fed to a god who chewed twice.
He had arrived at the village at last.
The village still breathing, pretending the night was ordinary.
Grimm dismounted. His boots struck the ground with the dull weight of finality. From his hip, he drew his sidearm, the Wraith Breaker, its surface a patchwork of runes that glimmered faintly, feeding on the distant moonlight the way leeches consumed blood. The gun did not gleam so much as it pulsated, like the heart when it knows whose throat it will stop.
He tilted his head back at the massive tower.
A three hundred foot throat of stone yawning above rose above like the claw of a starved god, waiting to scar the heavens .
The creaking door hung crooked, half rotting, inviting the dark rider to its challenge. Grimm drove his boot through it. Wood exploded inward like broken bones.
Inside, the narrow spiral stairs waited.
He ascended.
The wood below was slick with rime, each step groaning the way the undead groan. The old walls breathing in centuries of cold air around him.
Then came the scream.
It shattered the hush like glass, rising from above, the sound of a throat both human and not erupted. Grimm's eyes flared white, catching motion: a flailing silhouette, body twisting as it plummeted past him.
He shuffled against the wall.
The corpse struck the lower stairs with a sickening crack, limbs folding backward as the spine gave way.
Then, silence.
Grimm's gaze narrowed, shifting back to the tower's peak. He climbed faster. The wind grew colder with each step, until it seemed the very air was resisting him.
At the summit, a wooden hatch waited beneath a crudely built ladder. As he ascended, the exit creaked open under his hand, revealing a world of unholy stillness.
He emerged. The moon shone full over the tower. The iron bell above him swayed, though no wind touched it.
The roof was slick with frost and shadow. No hiding places, only the bell, and the three-hundred-foot drop into the pale stones below.
Behind the bell, a shape stirred. The cultist.
He held a woman before him, his knife's edge pressed against her fair throat. Her eyes were wide, the color of dying sky; her tears frozen to crystal on her flushed cheeks as the mad man restrained her.
"Release her," Grimm said, the words a low and even command.
The man's pupils were beady and lifeless, his mouth trembling with a grin too large for his face. He sniffed her neck, his sharp nose tracing her jugular "But this one is so fresh. It would be a shame to release her."
"Now," Grimm replied, lifting the pistol. "And I'll grant you a quick death."
"A quick death?" The man laughed; short, brittle, full of unseen madness. "I am already dead, pale rider. Grant me one last meal, won't you?"
He pressed the blade closer. The woman whimpered, blood blooming where steel kissed her skin.
"The negotiation has ceased," Grimm said.
"Then you'll watch her die! Believe me rider, I'll kill her!"
The cultist leaned in to slice the woman's throat.
Grimm's finger flexed.
A flash erupted, white fire shattering the still winter air.
The bullet struck the knife's base, shattering it into shards. The cultist's scream cut short, his throat erupting a crimson tide of ichor upon his stained robes.
The woman stumbled free, clutching her neck as Grimm advanced toward the downed wretch.
"I believe you." Grimm growled as he kneeled to meet the man.
She stared at Grimm, terror and awe mingling. "You could have killed me!"
Grimm said nothing. His eyes glowed faintly, the void's light undulating behind them now, cold and ancient; the white light reflecting across the dying man's blood.
"Leave," he ordered, his voice as heavy as a coffin lid, eyes fixated on the gasping cultist choking in his iron grip, "Or follow your friend to the earth below."
She stood transfixed, her streaming tears creating icy rivers upon her face.
Grimm hoisted the man higher, close enough to taste the cultist's fetid breath.
Without turning, Grimm peered over his shoulder. His stare striking the woman like winter iron.
No words.
Only the weight of two white voids that had already judged her soul and found it wanting.
She ran, her terrified footsteps disappearing under the belltowers depths.
The cultist convulsed on the stones, holding his spewing gash as his legs quivered.
"Your soul is vile, wretch. But it is not you that I seek. Whom do you serve?"
The man choked a laugh, black froth spilling from his mouth. His vile breath rife with copper tinge and grave-dirt.
"W-wendigo..."
The word struck like thunder behind Grimm's eyes.
For a moment, the world tilted. He saw shapes moving in the periphery of thought, thin, emaciated figures devouring the dead beneath green auroras.
"What purpose does it seek?"
The cultist's grin split wider, a scarlet gash upon a shattering mask.
"She... will become... one..."
His head lolled.
Maniacal laughter spewed from his throat, high and broken, curdling to a wet, choking gurgle.
His neck snapped with the sound of a broken branch. The body hung limp in Grimm's grip, still smiling at a joke only the dead understood.
For a heartbeat, the sky pulsed from afar; like something vast had blinked.
The voice of G'norr rippled through Grimm's mind.
"Wendigo. To the north."
Grimm closed his eyes.
A slow breath leaked from him, thin and white as a dying prayer.
"Yes, G'norr."
He seized the cadaver by the front of his blood-soaked robes, lifted it one-handed like a sack of discarded promises, and discarded him over the edge.
The body dropped without a sound of it's own.
Three hundred feet below, the stones answered with a wet, indifferent thud.
Below, the woman shrieked, cracking the night like thin ice.
She let her friend's ruined corpse slip from her grip. Blood painted her dress in wet, dripping spatters; crimson flecks dotting her cheeks like war paint.
A second impact struck from behind her.
She spun.
Grimm's bloodied boots stood in the doorway, planted squarely her friend's torso. The body was severed grotesquely at the waist, intestines splayed open like a macabre butchery, entrails steaming in the cold.
The monolithic Grimm straightened, unmoved, blood dripping from his coat hem in slow, uncaring drops.
She fell backward onto the cultists corpse, thin fingers sliding through the cold gore. A terrified sob tore from her throat as she scurried away from the dark figure filling the tower doorway, a shape cut from hell itself.
Grimm stepped over the halved man without looking down. He raised his fingers to his lips and whistled, low and dreadful.
Hoofbeats responded, emerging from the dark like a shadow in the night.
She could only stare, the black around her eyes mingling with the blood on her face.
Grimm swung up to the horse without a word, without a glance.
What was he? The question burned colder than the winter wind that engulfed her.
The reigns cracked like a beast tamer's whip.
Windows in the village began to flicker, one by one, candles lighting lanterns to the sound of the woman's frenzy.
The horse neighed, a sound torn from something ancient, and reared high against the moon. For one heartbeat, Grimm's silhouette sliced his figure black against the silver moon.
Hooves slammed the ground.
Snow exploded outward in a perfect white ring.
Then, they were gone, thundering north, swallowed by the night that seemed to greet them.
Flashes of the vile cultist seared Grimm's eyes, "Wendigo," he whispered, the name full of dread came with vile images.
He shook off the nightmares, leaning forward as the horse hammered the earth below.
The silence returned, and only the old whisper remained:
"The flesh weakens. The will does not."