Near Lake Erie, February 1886.

A blizzard rolls through dead woods, and the snow is wrong. Wet flakes mix with a clinging green ash that cakes onto clothes and skin like mortar. Every step is heavier than the last. Hunger has been a constant companion for days. It is the kind that stops being a feeling and becomes a sound, audible in the quiet between gusts of wind.

Three strangers trudge together because being alone out here is how people vanish.

To one side is a jittery chaplain, John Wilson, half-hidden in a cloak, eyes always scanning corners that do not exist in an open forest. To the other is Katya Blackheart, tall and athletic, wrapped in tight black leathers with a dark half-cape, moving like someone who has already decided she will not die out here.

The road is not a road anymore. It is just direction. Just forward. Just surviving.

And as the wind howls, each of them drifts into the same thought, the same anchor. The last real meal they remember.

The story cuts back.

Four weeks earlier.

John Wilson sits in his own parlor with an older couple across from him. His home is prepared for the work: religious iconography, candles, pools of melted wax, and a table that looks used too many times for grief and desperation.

The couple is here to reach their dead child. The mother sobs with a hope that hurts to witness. The father watches John like he expects a swindle and is ready to call it out.

Money is counted and placed on the table anyway.

John sells them the ritual with practiced confidence. Hands must stay on the table. No one breaks the circle. The spirits will speak through him. They will not be seen, but it will be obvious when it happens. The father balks at the idea in blunt terms, but the mother believes. She is the one John has to convince, and he knows it.

The table is set for four, like a mockery of a family dinner, as if the missing seat could be filled by a voice.

As they begin, the house is quiet except for the mother’s breath and the scrape of hands settling onto the wood.

Then the world changes.

A low rumble begins under the floorboards. The table trembles. The windows rattle in their panes.

Through half-lowered eyelids, the mother claims she can see something. A light. A brightness in the distance.

Then the room floods with it. A blinding white light tinged green, pouring through the window like a tide. It is there and gone in a heartbeat, but it leaves the couple electrified. The mother presses harder into the ritual. The father leans in despite himself.

They want their son to follow the light.

John tries to keep the moment under control, tries to stay in character, tries to make this about grief and closure and payment.

But when he opens his eyes, he sees what they do not.

Green wisps assemble around the table, floating in the air like smoke learning how to think. They drift closer, drawn toward him.

John’s fear is immediate and honest. He abandons the performance and bolts, muttering excuses about needing fluids, fleeing upstairs as the couple remains in the parlor, unaware of the things forming behind their own shoulders.

John hits the top of the stairs and stops short.

A line of spectral figures waits for him there, shoulder to shoulder, packed into the narrow hallway. They are not one spirit. They are many. Their shapes are random, mismatched, and unfinished, but each second gives them more definition. Faces, arms, clothing, the outlines of people who should not be in his home.

John lifts his hands, tries to speak, tries to understand whether they can hear him.

The moment he addresses them, they snap into attention like starving animals scenting blood. Heads turn in unison. Hands reach. Desperate grasping, as if they can pull warmth out of him.

John tries to dodge through them. He tries to run.

He cannot.

He retreats back down the stairs and bolts for the front door, bursting into the bitter cold outside.

The night air steals John’s breath. The cold is vicious, and in the sky he can still see the trace of a green streak, a scar across the heavens from whatever passed overhead.

Then the earth begins to shake.

The house sways. The ground shudders.

And the dead appear everywhere.

Green-tinged spectral forms pop into existence around John in the yard, in the street, in the air where nothing was a second ago. Dozens become hundreds. They reach for him, not with violence at first, but with need.

Questions flood his mind, layered on top of one another until thought becomes noise.

Who are you. Where am I. Am I dead. Can I be one of them.

One small spectral girl stands out, beautiful even in death, her plea simple and heartbreaking. Can I go where George went.

John cannot answer what he does not know. He points them toward the green streak in the sky. Toward the light. He tells them to go. He tells them all to go.

But the world is chaos. Horses go wild. Windows shatter. People scream. The quake keeps rolling through the city.

John retreats back inside, desperate for control, desperate for barriers and rules. He searches for salt. He lights candles. He does every occult thing he has ever pretended to believe in, because pretending is not enough anymore.

The spirits pack into his home until even light struggles to penetrate. Hands paw at him from every direction.

The pressure builds. The noise crescendos.

And the story cuts away before John can learn whether any of it works.

Four weeks earlier.

Elsewhere, in a cold and damp cellar, a military cadet fights sleep by lamplight. Josiah Rubinson wears a standard issue uniform of the era, the kind meant for discipline and order, not for what the world is becoming.

On his desk is a simple meal, coffee and canned beans, the dull fuel of military life.

In front of him is something that does not belong in a soldier’s hands.

A decrepit, moldy, ancient book, found weeks before during a deployment in the Arizona territories. It was given to Josiah because he was, in someone’s words, “the expert in this type of thing,” a phrase that says more about the Army’s desperation than its sense.

The book is written in blood.

The text is difficult to decipher. Time has eaten parts of it. The blood has flaked and smeared and faded. But enough remains to give the shape of the horror inside.

It speaks of boons granted by terrible occult beings. Power, exchanged for something, promised in the kind of language that always hides the price until it is too late.

As Josiah pours over the pages, a bugle sounds outside, sharp and commanding.

A call to muster.

In the middle of the night.

That is wrong. Everything about that is wrong.

But the Army does not ask permission to be afraid.

Josiah is pulled from the book into duty, out into a night that is already unraveling. Whatever is happening beyond the cellar is large enough that the military is moving in the dark.

There is tension in every order. A sense that no one really knows who is in charge of what comes next.

And as Josiah is dragged into the night, the book follows, not as an object but as a weight.

Something has already been invited into his life, and it is not interested in being forgotten.

Four weeks earlier, minus a day.

The night after the meteor streaks across the sky.

Katya sits at a modest meal in a warm home, the kind of warmth that feels fragile when the world outside is burning. For the last twenty-four hours, the city has been chaos. Fires across the skyline cast everything orange. Thick smoke hangs in the air. Screams rise and fall in the distance. People have seen things that break the mind when you try to hold them too tightly.

At Katya’s table, there are four chairs.

One is empty.

No one has heard from her brother since before the meteor.

Silence sits among them like a fourth guest, heavy and uninvited.

Under the table, a blue heeler paws gently at Katya’s leg, hoping for scraps, hoping to comfort. The brass tag on its collar jingles when she scratches behind its ear.

Reginald.

Katya is described in the warmth of the room: six feet tall, athletic, clad in all black leathers and a black vest, built for movement, built for action. Even at home, she looks like someone prepared to run into danger, not away from it.

Outside, the world keeps screaming.

Then the violence comes to her door.

A brick crashes through the window.

Men on horseback, wearing robes, appear outside, framed by firelight and the burning city behind them. They shout. They spit hatred.

One calls her a mud lover. He claims the day has come. He claims he has been chosen from on high to be her reckoning.

Katya responds with motion, not fear.

She throws a knife through the broken window with expert precision, burying it in a rider’s shoulder. The man falls from his horse. The horse bucks and panics, throwing the others into chaos for a heartbeat.

Inside, the shattered brick has smashed an oil lamp. Fire catches immediately, licking up tablecloth, curtains, rug. The room that was warm becomes a trap.

Katya orders her parents to move. Mother, father, upstairs, now.

She yells for Reginald to run outside, and the dog obeys, vanishing from view into a city gone mad.

But the riders do not stop.

One of them runs to the window and grabs Katya, trying to drag her through the broken glass. She fights, but he is strong. The struggle becomes raw and physical. Glass scrapes her stomach and hip. Her mother tries to grab her, tries to hold on, but the rider’s strength wins.

Katya is pulled out.

Her mother hits the ground hard, the breath knocked from her, gasping.

Katya tells her to get to safety anyway. To go.

Katya’s story does not pause for grief. It becomes survival.

Four weeks after the meteor.

The blizzard and ash return. The hunger returns.

John, Katya, and Josiah are together now, though the details of how they found one another are less important than the fact that they did. In this new world, companionship is not friendship yet. It is simply the opposite of dying alone.

The landscape is stripped bare. No leaves. No vegetation. Everything coated in ash, the taste of it in the mouth, impossible to wipe away.

Their stomachs rumble in unison, so constant it is hard to tell whose is whose.

They keep moving because stopping is what bodies do right before they become landmarks.

Then they find signs of something worse than hunger.

In the storm, they come upon a ruined wagon.

It is not abandoned peacefully. It is torn open, its contents scattered. Blood stains the snow. Bones are visible, not the clean bones of time, but the broken evidence of violence. Whatever happened here was recent enough to feel close.

The wagon is proof that the woods are not empty.

It is also opportunity. Where there is a wagon, there may be supplies. Where there are supplies, there may be one more day of living.

They search. They move carefully.

And the lake nearby answers with a sound that does not belong to stillness.

Cracking.

The frozen lake is a flat expanse of white, but it is not silent. The ice groans and complains beneath the wind. The surface is a promise that it might hold you, and a threat that it might not.

Something massive is approaching.

Reginald, reunited with Katya on the road at some point before this moment, is spooked. He cannot see far over drifts, but his nose tells him what his eyes cannot. He knows something is coming, even if he cannot place it.

The sound grows louder.

Then the monster charges out of the storm.

It was once a grizzly bear.

Now it is a grotesque engine of mutation.

Bone spurs jut from its arms and legs. Massive spikes, like ribs turned outward, protrude from its back. Its face is misshapen. Teeth grow through its own skull. Flesh hangs and jiggles like sacks of water threatening to burst, held together by pain and momentum. Open sores and ruined tissue mark it all over.

It is enormous, something like twelve hundred pounds of hunger and rage.

It catches their scent.

It charges full speed across the ice.

The lake responds. Cracks spiderweb outward in every direction, the echoing sound of a frozen lake giving way under stress.

John, staring at his knife, knows steel alone will not solve this. Instinct and terror work together. He warns Katya with the gun to shoot the ice, to make the lake itself their weapon.

They scramble for position, trying not to panic, trying not to die, while the bear closes distance with horrifying speed.

The fight is frantic, a mix of gunfire, desperate movement, and the constant threat that the ground beneath them is as deadly as the creature in front of them.

During the chaos of the encounter, Josiah’s book makes itself known.

It begins to vibrate violently, pages rustling on their own as if a wind is trapped inside it. It is not reacting to the cold. It is reacting to the moment.

Josiah makes a decision that is half instinct, half surrender.

He sets the book down. He opens it.

A bright green light floods out, washing over him with a warmth he has never felt before. Not heat. Not comfort. Something deeper. Something complete. Something that does not feel human, but does not feel unwelcome either.

A voice speaks in his mind, crowding out all other thought.

It tells him not to be afraid. It claims to be what he seeks. It calls itself the edge that guts the shadow. It calls itself his salvation.

Josiah picks the book up and clutches it to his chest.

The warmth moves from his face into his whole body, radiating from within.

And whatever power this is, it is now part of him.

The battle with the mutant bear drags them all through pain, fear, and exhaustion. Nobody comes out untouched. Even when flesh survives, something inside does not.

At a crucial point, the ice gives way. The lake becomes as dangerous as the beast. Water and black slush swallow light. The storm turns every movement into a fight for breath.

When the worst of it finally passes, they are left with silence and the aftermath, trying to understand whether the monster is dead, whether the ice has taken it, whether it will rise again.

They look for each other through the snow and the chaos, frantic and terrified of finding only absence.

After what feels like an eternity, Josiah appears.

He runs as fast as he can from the lake, coated in black nastiness that drips off him and begins to freeze solid the moment it hits the air. He is in pain. He is shivering. He looks like the world tried to keep him and failed.

At the tip of his spear is a green glowing crystal, bright enough to be seen through the storm, like a shard of the same green that scarred the sky weeks ago.

He collapses onto the shoreline near the others, and they react like survivors do, with relief that looks a lot like anger.

They are alive.

They are not safe.

On the shore, they scramble for shelter.

Dead trees surround them, some standing, some fallen. In the snow drifts, they find a cramped alcove formed by the way the wind piled the world. It is not comfortable, but it is cover.

They build a lean-to with what they have. Blankets become walls. A tinderbox becomes hope. Charcoal helps them coax flame out of wet wood.

A fire catches.

For the first time in what feels like forever, warmth touches their skin and stays there.

They sit close to it, watching the light flicker on faces that are still strangers, still haunted, still breathing.

John is forced to remember the visions and the voices and the dead that filled his home. Josiah feels the book’s warmth inside him like a second heartbeat. Katya, as always, is action first, but even she is forced to acknowledge how narrow the line has become.

In the glow of the fire, the question is not what happened.

The question is what comes next.