Learning the Ways of the Night from the Wolf - Chapter 4

“Aaah!”

But nothing happened to Tina. She was not seized by the hair, not grabbed by the shoulders and beaten.

All she saw was the Marquess’s greasy face as he let out a single shriek and plummeted into a sunken chasm below.

“Hah, hah.”

The sound of something crashing down, shattering on impact. Tina glanced back for only a moment, then kept moving. She wanted to run until not even the sound of breathing could be heard from where the Marquess had fallen. Even as her legs gave out and she was reduced to crawling, she could not bring herself to stop.

“Hh—”

She prayed.

The tears came flooding in belatedly. And so Tina wiped her tears and prayed once more. That someone would save her. She didn’t even know what she needed saving from, and still she prayed and prayed until at last, even her arms gave out and she could no longer crawl.

***

“Mother.”

Tina dreamed in the blizzard. It was the same snowfield she saw in her dreams every time.

The image of her younger self, crying and clinging in the blinding snowstorm, begging not to be left behind, and her mother, holding her quietly. The images drifted through her hazy consciousness.

She wanted to see her mother’s face. She wanted to know what expression her mother had worn when she left her behind forever.

But the blizzard was too fierce. She couldn’t read anything. As always, there was only a white void.

“Hk—”

Tina gasped awake with a scream-like breath. Lifting her head with difficulty at the unfamiliar sight that greeted her, she saw a long, jagged crack above her.

‘A cliff?’

She looked around. On either side stretched a narrow gap, barely wide enough for a single person to pass through. Tina quickly realized she had fallen into a tight crevice between cliff walls. In the end, she hadn’t gotten far at all, and she’d tumbled into a chasm much like the one the Marquess had plunged into.

“Ugh!”

Instinctively trying to push herself up toward the gap above, Tina cried out and collapsed again. Something must have gone wrong in the fall as she felt an excruciating pain shoot up from her left leg.

Tina leaned against the rock face and spent a long time steadying her breathing. She wanted to know how much time had passed, but the blizzard raging above the cliff was too fierce; all she could see was a hazy, white sky.

‘So cold.’

Tina felt her consciousness dimming bit by bit. She had sprinted across the snowfield in the dead of winter wearing nothing but a thin nightgown, then plummeted into a crevice of unknown depth. For a body as frail as hers, one that had never known a single day of outdoor activity, giving out was only natural.

Just as exhaustion was about to drag her back into sleep…

‘Hm?’

Tina caught the sound of slow, labored breathing. Irregular and rough, yet unmistakably faint, coming from somewhere not far from her.

She turned her head toward the sound and made out something in the darkness. She spotted dark mass or perhaps a piece of the darkness itself, which was rising and falling shallowly in time with those feeble breaths.

And in the very next moment, Tina had to clamp a hand over her mouth to keep from screaming. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could finally make out what the shape was.

‘Gray fur, a massive body, and—’

Sharp claws. It was a beast. A beast of the winter mountain.

Tina didn’t know precisely what creatures lived on the snow-covered winter mountain. She only knew that, occasionally, servants would return from the mountain missing a limb. Each time, they would say the same thing:

‘The winter mountain is home to beasts that eat humans.’

The realization that death lay before her eyes broke the dam on her tears once more. She didn’t want to whimper, but her terror-soaked body would not obey.

Tina imagined her own death. Fleeing a midnight intruder, only to be devoured by a beast of the winter mountain… maybe that was how her fate was meant to end.

As if sensing a presence…

The beast of the winter mountain was rising. Death was drawing near.