The horses felt it first. Gristle had been shifting her weight for the past ten minutes, ears swiveling without settling. The other horses did the same, restless in a way that had nothing to do with cold. Their breath still came in thick white clouds that hung in the air before dissipating. But there was something that they couldn’t put their finger on. The wind had died completely. Not eased. Died. The air that replaced it was heavier, wetter, pressing against exposed skin with a damp weight that hadn't been there an hour ago. The cold had changed character. It wasn't the dry bite of a clear winter morning anymore. It was thick and close, and it smelled faintly of clean metal, the way air smells when snow is already falling somewhere above the clouds and working its way down. Christofer hadn't consciously registered any of this. His body had, though, and it was making him uneasy for reasons he couldn't explain.

  Behind them, the chain went taut one last time. He heard it. The links grinding against wood, the creak of stressed metal. Then the sound changed. Not a snap. Something deeper, a groan that seemed to come from the ridge itself, from deep in the frozen earth. It went on for three heartbeats. Four. Five. Then the sound of the chain sliding—not freed, but what had been anchored shifted, ground down, dropped a few inches and caught again on something new. The slack it had gained was small. It was enough. The wyvern's range had just increased. Gristle's gait hitched, ears flat. Then she stopped.

  Christofer pressed his boots into her sides. She backed up instead. One step. Two. Away from the group. Away from the other horses.

  "No. No, wrong way."

  He tugged the reins left. She pulled right, head tossing.

  "Gristle…"

  She bolted. Not toward the Captain. Not toward the road. Into the village. Between buildings. Into narrow spaces where structures crowded close on either side.

  "Shit!"

  He yanked the reins. She ignored him entirely, hooves hammering frozen ground. Behind him, voices shouted. Halvar. The Captain. Too far away now. Getting farther. Gristle galloped between snow-covered buildings, turned sharply around a corner. Christofer nearly slid off, caught himself on her mane. His fingers were woven into coarse hair. He couldn't feel them anymore. Couldn't feel much of anything except the pounding in his skull. Deep, rhythmic, like someone hammering nails into the base of his brain, and the irregular, arrhythmic pulse under his gambeson. The glow leaked through the fabric, through the tufts of growing black weaving, casting faint green light across Gristle's neck.

  His ribs screamed. His vision blurred. She turned again. Another corner. He didn't know where they were anymore. The village, somewhere. Away from the others. Inside the ruined longhouse, a sound. Metallic. Scraping. The chain rattling against timber. The wyvern was moving. Shifting. Pacing. Working at something. Gristle's eyes rolled white. She turned and bolted. His fingers loosened. Christofer tried to hold on. They wouldn't grip. His body had nothing left. The world tilted. He felt himself sliding. Tried to catch himself. His body had stopped listening. He flew off the saddle, into the air.

  He hit snow. Deep snow. It absorbed the impact but didn't stop the pain that exploded through his ribs. A bright, splintering agony that ran from his spine to his sternum. His vision whited out. He lay there, facedown, gasping. The cold pressed in. Snow melted against his cheek. Behind him, hooves faded. Shouts faded. Then nothing. Just wind starting to pick up, carrying the first scattered flakes. Then black crept in from the sides like curtains closing.

  * * *

  Silence woke him. Too quiet. The eerie silence when you could hear nothing besides the building intensity of wind and snow. No animals, No people. No signs of life. As if everything had fled. Christofer opened his eyes. Snow. Sky. He was on his back. In an alley between buildings. Alone. He pushed himself up and a blanket of snow fell off him. His body screamed. Everything hurt. The cold air ripped at his face, raw and sharp as broken glass. Each breath burned. Christofer tried to stand. Pushed himself up. His legs shook but held. Pain lanced through his ribs with every breath. His right shoulder was a mess of torn muscle. His left wasn't much better. Leaning against a wall, gasping.

  ‘Where is everyone?’

  He looked around. Saw tracks. Hoof prints. Leading away. They'd left, and a while ago, looking at the way the prints had been partly covered by the falling snow. When Gristle turned, they'd kept going. The silence stretched.

  Then he heard it. Faint at first. The sound of something heavy moving through snow. Claws scraping stone. A low, wet breathing. The thrum of a growl hit the chest first. Deep. Resonant. Instantly recognizable. Like before, an engine turning over, finding its register. But now there were no walls to contain it. The sound spilled out, uncontained.

  He couldn't run. His body wouldn't allow it.

  The heat under his bandages pulsed. The gambeson was failing. He could feel it. The runes burning out one by one. Too hot. Too unstable. Energy building with nowhere to go. Seeking release. Heat. Not pain. Heat. Intense. Like lying too close to a fire. But under his skin. In his chest. Spreading. The heat spiked. Sharp. Immediate. The glow under his bandages flared bright enough that he could see it through his closed eyelids each time he blinked.

  The sound of claws stopped.

  Christofer looked up. The wyvern stood at the end of the alley. Six meters of scales, teeth, spikes, and proto-feathers. Those dark eyes found him. Locked on. The head tilted. Birdlike. Assessing prey. It knew he was injured. Trapped. Easy. The neck coiled back into that pronounced S-curve. He stumbled. He really couldn't run like this. He reached into his pocket with his right hand. Found the mug. Pulled it out. His grip was weak but it held.

  The wyvern's tail rose behind it. Positioned. Ready. Then it moved. Not the head. The tail. It lanced forward. Fast. Aimed at his chest. Christofer ducked. The blade punched into his right shoulder. Through gambeson. Through flesh. Pain exploded white-hot and immediate. His vision whited out but he stayed conscious through sheer stubbornness. He grit his teeth.

  ‘Grab it. Gecko. Like you did with the bird back at Iskandar. You should be able to, right?’

  “Theoretically.”

  The gecko lanced out a black tongue that grabbed the tail, curving around it. Blood welled from his shoulder. The tongue extended, wrapping behind the blade. The tail jerked. The blade shifted in the wound. The gecko backed up, sank into him, left the tongue as a tendril sprouting from his shoulder.

  “You might be able to form another… tendril.’ rippled from the gecko.

  The gecko resurfaced on his back and spat out another tongue that locked the blade down. The wyvern tried to pull back. Stopped. Held. It shrieked in confusion and rage. It pulled harder. But the blade didn’t come loose, it merely pulled Christofer closer. The blade shifted but the gecko's grip held. The tail was anchored. The wyvern took a step closer instead.

  He shifted the mug to his left hand. More strength there now than his dominant hand. More control. He couldn't swing it. He had to think. Fast. He turned the mug around carefully. Opening facing his palm. Fingers wrapped around the ceramic body, avoiding the handle.

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  “A missile is just a controlled explosion. An explosion is building, and you have something that can be a missile.” rippled from the gecko.

  Christofer raised his left hand. Palm out. Mug pressed against it. He focused. Pulled blood from his wound. Drew it toward his palm. Toward the mug's opening. A blood rune formed inside the ceramic mouth. Floating. Red spinning circle. Red light casting shadows across snow. The wyvern stomped closer. Three meters. Two. Christofer channeled the failing gambeson's energy into the rune. As much as he could manage. Like trying to uncork an explosion and siphon just enough without blowing himself up. Then pushing that genie back into bottle and hoping there would be no negative effects. The red light grew brighter. Hotter. The air around it distorted.

  One meter. Its mouth opening, visibly readying to lunge. He’d never made the spell work in the first place, so he figured he might as well just make it intentional. He intentionally just replaced the word he would often misspell, although it also exploded when he said it correctly.

  "Exevo… Damn?"

  For a half-second, nothing happened. The rune pulsed. The wyvern lunged. The rune didn't explode outward. The failed casting caused the spell to fail and it imploded. Collapsed into itself. As expected. All that energy compressed into a single violent point. Then released into an explosion. The recoil slammed back into his palm, up his arm. He felt something crack. Bend back in an odd direction.

  The mug punched through air. Through the wyvern's open mouth. Through the back of its skull. The mug punched through and arced into the snow behind it in a spray of bone and brain matter spraying out the exit wound, dyeing the snow pink with blood spatter and a fine red mist. The creature's head snapped back. Its body went rigid. Forward momentum carried it two more steps before the legs buckled. Six meters of dead weight crashed into the snow beside him. The impact shook the ground, it pulled him with it, it’s tail still embedded in his shoulder. And something else was spreading. Cold. Not from the snow. From inside. Starting where the blade pierced flesh. Moving outward. The paralytic.

  Christofer felt his legs give out. He fell sideways. Landed in the snow next to the wyvern's head. Those dark eyes stared at him. Already going glassy. Empty. His body locked up. Completely. He couldn't turn his head. Couldn't close his eyes. Couldn't move at all. Just staring into the dead creature's face. Drool leaked from the corner of his mouth. He couldn't wipe it. Couldn't swallow. Couldn't even blink. The wind kept building up its momentum as it cut past them. His own heartbeat was pounding in his ears.

  ‘If you can pull something toward me, pull that shit out of my shoulder, gecko.’

  The gecko climbed down the right arm, down the hand outstretched into the snow. Its grip on the blade shifting. Pulling. The squelch of the animal blade slowly slid out, opening a wound wider. Dyeing the snow with his blood. The wound was gaping, and the blood was not stopping.

  “You are bleeding to death, I can keep it closed, with a cost.” rippled out from the gecko.

  The gecko shifted its attention, dropping the tail entirely, focusing instead of trying to pull the wound closed. It wouldn’t stop the internal bleeding, but it would lessen the rate that he was bleeding. Time passed. He didn't know how long. The sky stayed gray. Snow kept falling.

  “We can’t maintain this for long. As you know, magic costs blood.”

  Christofer lay there staring. Watching the wyvern’s blood pooling toward him, hitting his face. Irritating his eye as he couldn’t blink. The sky stayed gray. Snow kept falling. The wind kept picking up.

  ‘Does it have to be my blood?’

  “Theoretically, no. Nothing explicitly stated that the blood had to be yours.”

  ‘You did manage to stop that tail. That would’ve been a pretty decent weight. Could you… lift me? Grab onto the walls behind me and basically make me puppeteer myself? Using the blood of the wyvern as the battery, instead of me?’

  A black tongue launched into the wall, pressed onto it, pulled his right shoulder up, his face pressed into snow as his body dragged itself into the snow.

  ‘Now the other wall, anywhere. I need to breathe.’

  Another tongue shot out from his left shoulder. His limp body swung up in an odd pose, like a dead fish that was being manipulated. His paralyzed body wheezed a breath. Pain lanced through everything. He drooled, unable to grit his teeth. He saw the creature in front of him. He willed the gecko to pull his eyelids. shut and open, repeatedly. He was going manual with these controls. The burning vision made the Wyvern come back into focus once more. He willed the gecko to move again.

  Another tongue shot out from his leg, grabbing onto the wyvern. His body shambled forward, boot splashing into the warm red fuel that powered his advancement. Like he was an undead stumbling for prey. Somehow, despite his body being paralyzed, he took a step. His legs held. Swaying, but barely. The tongue shot forward, black like a tendril, he was another step closer. Two new tendrils slapped onto the Wyvern and the two attaching to the walls snapped and retracted. Further tendrils seemed to wither mid-air. It seemed like five was his limit. The instant the tendrils retracted, he sank to his knees. Now in front of the beast.

  The blood on the ground was changing. Thicker now. Slower to respond. When he formed the next tendril, the edges were ragged where before they'd been clean.

  He sacrificed the tendril on his left side, and he slid into the beast. A tendril attached between the tail and wyvern. It contracted, stabbing the Wyvern’s tail into itself, into the soft underbelly. However, it needed force. A practice of force. Less blood of the ground contracted into a red circle behind the tail. Smaller. It imploded, punching the tail deeper into its belly. Christofer let go of another tendril. His face hit the snow, into the snow, face and snow buried into snow, but allowing him to still see.

  Blood on the ground danced up into another circle, smaller, on the side of the tail. Detonation. The tail swung. Not slicing cleanly, but tearing. The wyvern's stomach ripped open along a jagged line, like gutting a fish from belly to throat. Viscera spilled out in a hot, steaming rush, costing Christofer a few strands of hair as it narrowly swung over his head. His movements were not practiced, but desperate struggles of a half-dead man lying in a river of blood spilling around him, loops of intestine slid free first flowing past his face and coiling in the snow like pale snakes. Then the stomach, still half-full of half-digested something. A slurry of meat, maybe, or the remains of whoever hadn't run fast enough.

  Then another organ, dark and slick, ruptured by the tail's passage. Bile and blood and half-formed digestive fluids mixed together, steaming in the cold air. Not everything came out. Some organs held, anchored by connective tissue. A loop of something coiled deep in the cavity that refused to budge. He didn't have time to fight it. The gecko's tendrils were flickering, the wyvern's blood nearly spent. He let go. The wyvern's belly was open. Steam rising from the cavity where its innards had been. A pocket. Warm. The cavity was open enough. He could fit. But he needed more tendrils to move him.

  The wind had found its voice. It wasn't just blowing anymore. It was howling. Snow fell in sheets now. Two tendrils were still dedicated to holding his wound closed. He needed to focus, as much as he could, despite it being frayed from numerous places screaming, the blood siphoning was too unstable, as areas started to coagulate, so his fuel was shrinking. The only two tendrils he could free was the one that kept him from bleeding to death. He needed to seal the wound. Cauterization. He formed two blood runes. One at the top of the gash. One at the bottom. The blood came sluggishly. Thick. Resistant. The circles formed slower than before, their edges rough. The detonation was tiny, barely a spark. But against open flesh, it was enough. His skin sizzled in a painful flash. The smell of burning meat filled his nostrils. His own meat. The rune seared a circle of flesh, welding the top of the wound shut at the cost of healthy skin around it. A puckered black coin of scar tissue, smoking in the cold air. The second rune at the bottom. Another misfire. Another slur. Another sizzle. Another circle of healthy flesh sacrificed to close the wound. Between them, the gape narrowed. The bleeding slowed. Stopped. He was closed. Welded. Two blackened circles bracketing a line of raised, angry scar tissue. But sealed. Freeing a tendril for use.

  The exit wound on his back took two more circles. Four total. Each one cost fuel he could barely spare. By the last one, the blood formed the circle in a sluggish crawl, the edges dissolving before it could complete. It held. Barely. Freeing up the fifth tendril. He lay there for a moment, staring at the gory opening. The storm was building. He could hear it now, wind screaming through the village, snow lashing past him, against walls.

  'I don’t want to, but I need to go in there.'

  Uncoagulated blood began to scatter in the wind. The time was now. This was survival. Nothing more. He assessed the opening. The ribs created a frame. Not wide. He'd have to angle himself. Thread through. And his body was dead weight. Completely limp.

  'Let's figure this out before its blood either runs out from use or coagulates beyond use.'

  Two tendrils still held him upright against the wyvern's flank. One from each shoulder, pressed against the scales. Three tendrils free. He started with the ground. Blood pooled there. Thick. Still warm. Fuel.