The party continues picking its way through the dead town, moving carefully through collapsed storefronts, broken porches, and half-caved walls that look ready to come down with a hard wind. Everything feels wrong in a way that does not stop feeling wrong. The air tastes like old smoke and rot. The silence does not behave like silence should. Even Reginald’s paws sound too loud in the snow and ash.

They are not alone.

After the searching, the near-misses, and the constant sense that something is watching from behind shuttered windows, the party finds living people in a place that looks like it has forgotten what “living” means.

An old Indigenous man, weathered into something sharp and stubborn, stands with his son. The son is young, but the world has already altered him. His hands are charred and cracked, as if heat lives beneath the skin. When he shifts his fingers, faint sparks and crackling light betray magic trapped in the flesh. He keeps himself wrapped in layers, shivering, guarding his hands, guarding his fear.

The meeting is tense and unromantic. There is no relief in finding survivors, only suspicion. The party questions why they are here. The old man throws the question back, because in a town like this, everyone’s presence is an accusation.

The son’s name is Ishkode.

They have barely exchanged enough words to decide whether they are allies when something moves behind them.

The interruption is sudden and violent.

A figure approaches, hard to make out in the gloom and drifting snow, and Ishkode reacts on instinct. He whips both hands up and releases a jet of fire, a full thirty-foot gout that catches the shape and engulfs it completely. For a moment the thing is only flame.

When the fire recedes, the truth is worse.

It is a mutated human, shaped by starvation and whatever magic has infected this land. Flesh hangs loose in strips and sacks, as though the body is failing to remember how to stay assembled. Pale skin carries a sick green tinge around the eyes. The teeth are enlarged, grotesque, with fangs and dried meat still caught along the gums. It is cooked by Ishkode’s blast, blackened and sizzling, and it still does not fall.

It charges anyway.

It closes the distance with a hunger that is almost joyful, and it goes for the old man first, raking wicked nails down him hard enough to knock him off his feet. The old man hits the ground prone, and the fight becomes immediate and personal.

The party moves to defend, firing, striking, and trying to keep the creature off the fallen man and away from Ishkode.

The longer they stay in this town, the more the hunger becomes its own weather.

It is not just empty stomach hunger. It arrives like a compulsion, like a thought pressed into the brain from the outside. It swells at the edges of every decision. When the party fights these things, they feel it in themselves. When they kill them, the temptation becomes sharper, uglier, more intimate.

In the chaos of the battles that follow, the party begins to understand that the town is infected by more than cannibals. There is a pressure, a curse, a presence. The hunger is a symptom of being near it.

During one brutal exchange, the impact of a rifle butt sheathed in green arcane force lands with a shockwave-like crack. The world goes white for an instant, and the party is hit with a vision:

Townfolk gathered around a corpse. Not murdered, not torn apart, simply dead from collapse and starvation. The disgust is immediate and human, and then a second thought slithers in behind it, quiet and nauseating.

Such an awful waste.

The mouth waters. The stomach rumbles.

And in the same vision, when the gaze drifts north, something moves between the trees. A darkness so deep it seems to swallow focus itself, skittering from trunk to trunk, impossible to lock eyes on. A permanent shadow. A predator made of absence.

The party snaps back into the fight with the sickening knowledge that the hunger is not only around them. It is trying to become them.

Another blow lands later, another crack of weapon against skull, and again the world goes white.

This time the party sees the town in daylight, walking streets that used to welcome travelers. Curtains snap shut as they pass. Behind shaded windows, green-tinged eyes watch like animals. A place that once promised warmth and food now radiates distrust.

Then, around a corner, three figures hunch over something in the street. When the party steps closer in the vision, the figures turn as one. Their mouths are wrong. Their teeth are wrong. They lunge with fangs bared.

The vision is not only memory, and not only warning. It is the town’s story forced into the party’s skull: starvation, suspicion, the moment the line broke, and the hunger that replaced everything else.

When they return to reality, the fighting is still happening, and the creatures are still coming.

The party faces multiple of the mutated, hungry townsfolk. They move with the jerky urgency of addicts, mouths stretched wide, saliva stringing down, hands reaching with claws that were once fingernails.

Combat in the ruins becomes messy. Shots echo strangely between collapsed buildings. Steel flashes. Arcane energy flares green in bursts that do not feel fully controlled. Ishkode fights too, fire in his palms like a trapped spirit, but he is also trying to protect his father, trying not to let fear make decisions for him.

The party holds the line, and the town’s dead hunger pays them back with injuries, close calls, and the constant threat that one mistake will become being dragged to the ground under a pile of teeth and nails.

Eventually, the immediate attackers are brought down. One collapses with its skull crushed, the sound of bone giving way like wet timber. The street becomes quiet in the way a battlefield becomes quiet: not peaceful, only waiting.

But the price is not finished being collected.

In the aftermath of one of the hardest surges of magic, the green light that’s been building around the party’s actions lashes out.

Energy that should have been contained escapes in one final burst and arcs into the old man.

He is thrown back across the snow, skidding, his son screaming “No!” as he goes down. The old man’s eyes close, his chest barely moving. The green light fades, and for a second it feels like the world itself is waiting to see if he stays dead.

The party reacts fast.

Reginald is sent to find the horse, guided by his uncanny nose, the dog vanishing into the night to retrieve what they cannot afford to lose. The party focuses on the old man, and John forces control over the wild power inside him to stabilize the dying man. It is not effortless. It is careful, trepidatious, like handling a lit fuse with wet hands.

The magic holds.

The old man stabilizes, still at death’s door, but not crossing it. His son looks up at the party with raw gratitude, the kind that hurts because it is so unguarded. For a moment, the town’s cruelty loosens its grip, and they are simply people keeping another person alive.

Night deepens. The party finally takes what shelter it can.

Ishkode tends to his father, staying close, refusing to leave him. Reginald circles, looking for a place to settle, still the steady heartbeat of the group even in a place that wants hearts to stop.

John drifts into sleep first. Katya follows, exhaustion taking her whether she wants it or not.

Josiah remains awake with the book.

When he opens it, the binding creaks and dust shakes loose like the book has been waiting centuries to be touched again. And when the pages part, something awakens in his mind.

The hair on the back of his neck rises as if someone stands right behind him.

A voice speaks into him, quiet and intimate, unheard by the others.

You have done well.

Josiah answers, honest and tired. He asks what more can be done, because the battle ahead feels like the edge of the world.

The presence with him is not new. He recognizes it. A power. A patron. Something with hands like blackened, mummified flesh and nails sharpened like claws.

The voice tells him the truth with no comfort in it.

The party will face a level of power near that of the being itself. The patron has given Josiah everything it can to help, but once the party is in the monster’s presence, the patron cannot join them. Josiah will have the boon, but the being will not be there beside him.

Then hands come from behind the book and grasp Josiah’s hands on either side, squeezing tight but not painfully. Energy surges up his arms and slams into his heart like a brand. The hands recede as quickly as they arrived, leaving that power balled up in his chest.

Josiah is left staring at the pages, trying to translate dread into preparation.

Later, the party becomes aware of the lights again.

The northern lights are visible, but not like any northern lights the party has ever seen. They do not feel distant and celestial. They feel close. Within a mile. Close enough to touch. Close enough to feel.

North of town, the sky looks wrong. The aurora becomes a beacon, and also a warning.

Ishkode explains that the lights have been here every night as long as he and his father have scavenged the town. They have never been attacked before. When danger felt near, they always left.

Tonight, the danger does not allow them to leave in time.

The party shelters, and Ishkode sits cross-legged by their small fire. He reaches out and pets sleeping Reginald, and for a moment the dog’s ear perks, one eye opening to confirm the touch, then closing again with a contented little snore. The softness of that moment stands out against everything else, like a candle in a mine shaft.

Josiah returns to his meditations on the book. The hours crawl toward morning.

Then hunger hits like a fist.

John and Katya are startled awake by a gripping, unnatural hunger, intense enough to feel like pain. It is not the normal ache of not eating. It is an imposed need, a curse demanding compliance.

And then, a bubble surrounds them.

A dome of safety settles over the camp. Inside it, the hunger vanishes. The relief is immediate and unsettling, because it proves the hunger is not internal. It is environmental. It is a pressure in the air, and this bubble blocks it.

The party understands quickly that stepping outside the dome would bring the hunger rushing back. Inside, they feel an uncanny safety, as if the world’s teeth cannot reach them.

They use the moment.

Katya builds a fire. Snow is melted to water for the horse. She speaks gently to the animal, trying to calm it, promising it freedom to flee if terror comes, while still hoping it will stay.

She also talks to Reginald, as she often does, half habit and half trust that the dog understands more than he should.

This time, something is different.

Reginald moves strangely, not playful, not restless, but cautious in a way that feels wrong for him. In combat he had been focused and clear, doing his job. Now, with safety around them, he looks at the world like it has become unfamiliar.

Estranged.

Katya stops tending the horse and crouches beside him, hands on his fur, checking him like an owner and a friend.

Reginald meets her eyes.

There is sadness there that did not exist before.

There is intelligence there that is far beyond what she has ever seen in him. Not the cleverness of a trained dog, but something looking out through his eyes that knows the shape of grief.

Katya tries to comfort him, petting him, soothing him. Reginald does not find much relief in it. He is present, but not entirely here.

The dome holds. The hunger stays away. The unease grows.

Morning approaches, but the world does not brighten in a comforting way. The aurora still hangs like a bruise over the northern trees.

The party knows they cannot stay.

Whatever is causing the starvation and cannibalism is north. The hunger intensifies the more they look that direction. The bubble provided respite, but it is not a solution. It is a delay.

They prepare to move toward the beacon in the sky, toward the source, because leaving without confronting it feels like letting it follow them forever.

And as they ready themselves, the magic between them stirs again.

Katya and John feel sparks leap from them, as if the air between their souls has become a wire. A spell begins to form out of the aether between them, not cast deliberately, but assembled by the wild rules of this new world.

An arcane ball forms in the air between them. It does not feel threatening, but it does feel like a weapon.

The party watches it take shape as if reality is deciding to arm them whether they asked or not.

When the weapons manifest, they feel dense with power, as though magic is dripping from the edges.

Ishkode watches, then clenches his fists. Light flares from the cracks in his burned skin.

“I will need no weapon,” he says, and the statement is not bravado. It is the truth of what he is.

Then he turns north with them.

“Let’s go kill a wendigo.”

They set off into the darkness toward the north, using the sky as their beacon. With every step, the hunger proves its purpose.

It is not simply hunger. It is a force that worsens the closer they get, stacking on top of their already depleted bodies like a second stomach gnawing at the first. It feels like they did not eat yesterday. It feels like their last meal was days ago. It makes their stomachs wrench and cramp with pain.

They fight it with willpower, focusing on forward motion, on not stopping, on not listening to the animal part of themselves that keeps whispering solutions.

The hunger tests them.

It tests Reginald hardest.

The dog begins to falter, each step looking more painful than the last, until he moves like a creature with a cramp, afraid to take another step. Katya lifts him, trying to help, and Reginald shudders at her touch. He drools. Saliva drips as if his mouth is betraying him.

He looks at Katya with sadness, then looks away like he cannot bear to hold her gaze.

Then he looks at Josiah.

And he licks his lips.

It is a small motion that lands like a gunshot, because it tells the party exactly what the hunger is trying to do. It is turning allies into food. It is turning love into meat.

They keep moving anyway.

North of town, the landscape changes into something that feels staged, like a ritual site.

Crystals rise from the snow, unnatural growths that catch and reflect the aurora’s sick light. They feel like exposed bones of the earth, infused with arcane charge. Their presence makes the air sharper, like breathing glass.

And in that place, the wendigo rises.

It is not introduced like an animal. It is introduced like an event. A thing that stands up and makes the world smaller.

The party engages, weapons and magic colliding with something that does not obey the rules that killed the other monsters. The wendigo is powerful enough that every move feels like it costs something.

The hunger continues to press in, threatening to fracture their focus at the worst moments. The crystals crackle with stored energy. The aurora looms too close, too bright, too present.

The battle becomes desperate.

Ishkode fights with fire and with his own body, paying for every second he stands. The horse panics in the way prey panics when it realizes it is near a god.

Reginald fights too, but something about him is still wrong. His movements, his eyes, his presence. He is there, but the dog the party knows is layered with something else, something that is being pulled in two directions.

As the fight escalates, Katya’s wild magic lashes outward again, and John’s presence makes it stronger. The spark between them ignites, and the consequences come fast.

In the chaos, Katya ignites the crystals.

Not one.

All of them.

Every crystal in the field flashes at once, a chain reaction of arcane light detonating across the snow. The explosion is not clean. It is violent magic, uncontrolled and massive, a moment where the battlefield becomes a furnace made of emerald fire.

When the light hits, time fractures.

John’s perception catches the scene like a photograph: smoke and sparks hanging suspended in the air, as if the world has paused to witness what happened. The crystals burn out into ruin. The ground is scorched. The air stinks of burnt flesh and singed hair.

And the wendigo is not visible in the immediate aftermath.

But the consequences are everywhere.

In the whiteness after the blast, something else happens.

Dozens of spirits move through the ruined field, all breathing a sigh of relief at once, a unified exhale that feels like a curse breaking.

They walk past the party in an unending line.

Some of them are recognizable: the people who once lived in the town, the ones whose eyes the party felt on them, the ones who followed from alley to broken doorway, the ones who watched like they were waiting for deliverance.

They were waiting.

They knew.

Among them, the old man from before steps forward. He does not speak aloud, but the party sees his mouth form the words as clear as if sound existed here.

Thank you.

Then he turns and walks into the forest with the rest, finally free to leave.

Josiah experiences something different.

The world goes white again, but this time it narrows until it is only him and the wendigo.

A vast nothing surrounds them. No trees. No snow. No aurora. Only the monster, severely diminished, damaged, weakened, but not dead.

Behind Josiah, familiar hands settle on his shoulders.

The patron.

A whisper curls into his ear, intimate and cold.

Mine is the blade that cuts through the shadow.

One of the hands moves forward and offers him a weapon.

Josiah takes the blade.

And he strikes.

He slashes through the wendigo in a full diagonal cut, and the creature shatters into thousands of shards of magical energy, exploding outward like broken stained glass made of spelllight.

The void collapses.

The world comes back.

Reality returns with arcane debris falling from the sky, sizzling as it hits the snow. The party is blackened, skin singed, hair burned, clothes smoking. The battlefield looks like something ancient and punished.

Then the losses become visible.

Ishkode is dead.

The horse is dead.

Reginald is gone.

Not a body. Not a whine. Not a pawstep. Nowhere to be seen.

The silence where the dog should be is louder than the explosion was.

And then the party sees their hands.

Each of them bears a permanent paw print etched into the skin. When acknowledged, it flashes with a faint green glow, like a brand that remembers Reginald even if the world refuses to return him.

The mark is not explained here, not fully. It is simply true, and it is now part of them.

The fight is over.

The hunger that haunted the town has been confronted at its source.

The spirits have been released.

And the party is left standing in the ruins of a victory that tastes like ash, branded with a paw print, missing the one creature who never asked for any of this.

Later, the truth settles in with its own cruelty.

Reginald had died before. Truly died. And he had been brought back.

That is why the sadness existed in him. That is why, in the dome’s safety, he looked at Katya with eyes that held too much understanding. That is why he carried grief like a second collar.

He did not belong in this world anymore.

He cherished the extra time anyway.

And in the final moment of that understanding, a memory crystallizes: a paw placed gently onto a hand, leaving behind a perfect print as a farewell that the body could not speak.

Somewhere beyond the party’s reach, the image of Reginald in an idyllic field lingers like a wound: peace for him, heartbreak for everyone left behind.

The paw prints remain.

The snow keeps falling.

And the world, newly magical and newly monstrous, does not pause to mourn.